Participants 2022
CoPeWithUs
AI Song Contest 2022 / participants
TEAM / CoPeWithUs
SONG / On a Journey Together
TEAM MEMBERS / Anna Hausberger, Christoph Pichler, Ivan Pilkov, Jakob Wögerbauer, Carlos Cancino-Chacón and Silvan David Peter
About the TEAM
We are a mix of students and researchers in AI and Computer Science, unified by our shared enthusiasm for music and the creative use of technology. Each of us plays at least one musical instrument and although we are not professional musicians, music plays an important role in our lives. We met through a course on Musical Informatics taught by Carlos and Silvan at the Institute of Computational Perception at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz. During that time, we explored methods to generate music using different algorithms and machine learning models for our student projects and felt motivated for a bigger challenge – so here we are!
For the recording of the song we received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, grant agreement No 101019375 (Whither Music?).
About the SONG
Our song explores the paradigm of a contest between human and machine, as in the famous Kasparov vs Deep Blue series of chess matches and in many sci-fi novels and movies. We would like to instead shift this into the more positive outlook of a collaboration, as also advocated today by Kasparov himself. Our vision is that of an opportunity for both people and AI to help each other on their shared journey of exploration and to learn something along the way. For the story we took inspiration from a scene in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey and tried to reimagine it as a rising conflict which ultimately leads to an intriguing resolution.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
We decided to present our idea in the form of a pop song with a clear storyline, which would reflect both the socio-cultural as well as the creative opposition of human and machine. First, we defined the structure as a dialogue between the two players (a human and an AI), represented in alternating verses, and wrote our lyrics accordingly. To achieve some musical separation between these parts, we used search algorithms to find complementary musical keys for the parts of the two opponents and the shared choruses. Then, formal grammars were applied to generate chord progressions and melodies for the two opponents, based on the chosen keys and the lyrics’ rhythmic structure, constrained by our vision. In contrast to that, a multitude of other open-source AI tools developed for pop music generation helped us co-compose further elements for the final musical score through a back-and-forth exchange of ideas. Among others, we chose Magenta.js for keys, drums and general instrumentation inspiration, Groove2Groove for guitars and accompaniment, and a pre-trained T5 model for additional lyric ideas. Parts of the song were later modified depending on which player they represent. “Human” parts had more of our intervention, whereas we gave more freedom to the AI generation for the “AI” parts. We made the final revisions of the score according to our musical intuition and the session musicians helped us to put everything together with their expressive performance.
Lyrics
This journey feels like without end
I wish to see those clouds
And trees that fill the place where stands
My wife in my old house
Your turn is taking too much time
You’ve got to make a move
I calculate – this game is mine
Your pawn play must improve
We should find a way to get there
We should find a way
I know my tactics very well
The rook takes on d2
Are you so really clever, HAL?
Then what means time for you?
A million operations, Frank
You missed the coming mate
Devices, engines, water tanks
I never make mistakes
We should find a way to get there
We should find a way
We should find a way to get there
We should find a way
I sense annoyance in your tone
So let me get this clear
You have no purpose on your own
That’s why you serve us here
I get the meaning of your words
But let us once more hear
If you alone can make it work
Or should I help us here?
We are on a journey together
Can we make it home?
(make it home)
We are on a journey together (home)
We can make it home (home)
We should find a way together
We should find a way
We should find a way together
We should find a way
We should find a way together
We should find a way
We should find a way together
We should find a way
We could find a way together
We will find a way