Participants 2022
Look Ahead
AI Song Contest 2022 / participantsTEAM / Look Ahead
SONG / Whispering
TEAM MEMBERS / Frederik Lebeer, Korneel van den Broek
About the TEAM
Korneel is a classically trained voilinist with a background in physics and engineering. After some years in the world of insurance and management consulting, Korneel joined a Tech startup in green energy. He has always enjoyed building new things and the crossover between music and AI is a perfect place to create.
Frederik is a singer-songwriter, jazz musician and civil engineer in physics. Fred has worked extensively in Belgium and abroad, both as an actor and as a musician. Currently, Frederik is a senior investment consultant with a keen interest in the AI-space.
About the SONG
Whispering has old roots which go back to 1920 with a chord structure developed by Paul Whiteman. The song became famous when Dizzy Gillespie wrote his Groovin’ High arrangement of the piece in 1945. In 2004, Al Jarreau reworked Groovin’ High as an amazing, blazing fast beatboxing piece. Using Al Jarreau’s song as a basis, Frederik wrote “Chambelona” in 2016. In the spirit of jazz, where musicians build on the bones of earlier compositions, the vocal track of Chambelona was the starting point and input for our AI model to produce “Whispering”.
While the song goes back to 1920, its lyrics are more relevant than ever in our fast-paced world. The song asks to slow down, be silent and listen...
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
Given that we wanted to produce a song with jazz influences, we started by building a custom dataset of 327 audio files of vocal jazz songs.
We used a variant of the MP3net model. This model takes a vocal track as input and then improvises instruments around the vocal track. After training the model for 12 days, the model was able to take the vocal tracks and almost instantly generated 100’s of different possible instrumentations for that track.
We structured the song along 4 vocal takes. We then asked the model to improvise instrumentations starting from pairs of the vocal samples. We selected 6 instrumentations which fit together in style and energy and aligned them with the vocals. Mixing together these 10 takes resulted in our song “Whispering”.
Lyrics
Silent
And listen,
The summer night has got something to say
How to be silent
And listen,
A little whisper like a preacher would pray
How to be silent
And listen,
Slow down stop the talk
I know it’s true dear
There’s no one but you
Silent
And listen,
The night'll whisper little things in your ear
How to be silent
And listen,
It's gonna whisper something you wanna hear
Honey be silent
And listen,
Have you heard it ever so clear
Whispering that I love you