Participants 2022
PAMP!
AI Song Contest 2022 / participantsTEAM / PAMP!
SONG / AI-LALELO
TEAM MEMBERS / Juan Alonso, Joel Cava (coord.), Sofía Oriana, Xandre Outeiro, David Santos, Marta Verde
About the TEAM
PAMP! pays tribute to Ana María Prieto, the first female computer programmer from Galicia (1942-2018), one of many women who were in the shadows throughout history. The Galician team is formed by Juan Alonso, technologist experienced in Machine Learning; Sofía Oriana, PhD in AI music and composer of Elisa e Marcela film (2019) by Isabel Coixet; Xandre Outeiro, traditional music artist at Projeto Trépia who has produced several soundtracks; David Santos, PhD in Telecommunications working in acoustics; and Marta Verde, digital visual artist and Associate Professor at Berklee College of Music (València Campus).
About the SONG
Galicia is a country of brave women, a land of witches, a strong Atlantic nation built in a female perspective due to the absence of the men, usually on the war front or fishing on the deep sea, being one of the first matriarchal societies in the world according to the ancient authors. AI-LALELO pays homage to all of them, those who kept our culture and language alive until today. Tradition and modernity merge in a new sound, an entry based on the typical Galician cantigas from the Middle Ages but with a futurist AI point of view which conveys an important message for our next generations: only we can ensure that our identity lives on.
The seamstress is the main character of the story, a Galician woman in the late nineteenth century, who has to combine throughout the year her door-to-door work sewing by machine with other housework or farm chores. What nobody expects is that she is actually a meiga (aka. a witch), who is preparing a winter coven.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
We start with the lyrics, making the machine (GPT-3) learn our mother tongue with more than 400 traditional Galician coplas, from which it generated new verses establishing the seasons of the year as the storyline. We only had to correct some spelling mistakes and then, we selected the texts with the least human intervention.
For the melody, we had different versions of A Costureria, a traditional cantiga compiled from 2001 until today, which we decided to submit to AI (Google Magenta) algorithms, generating a new melody that we used for the first verse. We repeated this process up to four times to obtain different melodies for each verse.
In terms of music, we wanted to pay homage to the Galician countryside, so we decided to record some instruments and farm tools, which we then processed with AI (DDSP). We got a hurdy-gurdy as the main instrument and also a tambourine, a bass drum, a weeding hoe, a plate, a frying pan and a little can of pepper.
Finally, we added vocals, a bass and a Jew’s harp in its natural form. For the mix we used a pinch of glitches and delays, algorithms and a random seed. In addition, we made a videoclip reinterpreting Galician typical scenes with AI (Disco Diffusion and different models) to use that new generated footage as main element for a non-linear composition using VDMX. Some audio parameters from the song were used as source for controlling parameters and sync, as well as the original videos are revealed at some moments of the delivered final video.
Lyrics
Galego
Costureira en primavera
botará-la sementeira
labrarás sen ter arado; ai si, ai non
nin máis outra ferramenta
A costureira no vranhe
camisa e saia cortou
inda se ía deitare
cando o sol alvoreou
Costureira polo outono
urdidoira polo vrán
pónsell’a cara morena
e as carnes como azafrán
A costureira no inverno
coa máquina a traballare,
á beiriña da lareira
vai frío, non é verdade?
English
Seamstress in spring
will sow the seed
will plow without a plough
nor another tool
The seamstress in summer
cuts a shirt and skirt
she goes to rest
when it begins to get light
Seamstress in autumn
touched by the summer
she got tanned face
and saffron skin
The seamstress in winter
works with a sewing machine
next to the fireplace
it’s getting cold, isn’t it?