Participants 2022
The HU
AI Song Contest 2022 / participantsTEAM / The HU
SONG / Come closer to my heart
TEAM MEMBERS / Jonas Moons, Yvette van der Haas, Leon Coolegem, Rosemarie van Herwaarden, Niels van Houtum, Floor Schukking, Jimmy Mulder
About the TEAM
As researchers, lecturers and students of the University of Applied Sciences Utrecht (HU), we wanted to create a song that would represent our community and the city of Utrecht. In our creation process, we fused artificial intelligence with the collective intelligence of our community.
About the SONG
Come closer to my heart is a sorrowful, somewhat bitter song about a woman who longs to be with her lover, but only experiences fleeting moments of connection. Our inspiration came from a poem in the city of Utrecht, which was used to generate lyrics using an AI tool. These lyrics in turn provided material for students and staff playing an AI piano. Somehow, all of this resulted in a sad song about unrequited love.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
We started with a hackathon that involved lecturers, researchers and students of the university. During this hackathon, we came up with the idea of producing a collective HU sound using AI. The resulting song is deliberately a co-creation, with AI generating the ideas and humans from our community selecting the best bits.
A Dutch poem on a mural in the city (Ontmoeting by Eddie Lee), which served as inspiration, was automatically translated to English using DeepL. The Jarvis lyrics generator was used to generate new lyrics from this material; it was set to resemble Billie Holiday songs (which is quite apparent from the unhappy love story that it came up with). Interesting lines that the AI produced were tweaked and re-ordered to form a coherent whole, set to rhyme and meter. Then, we approached random people on campus and asked them to play Google Magenta’s Piano Genius to these lyrics. This web app uses AI to map 8 keys to the full keyboard of a piano, allowing even non-musicians to generate interesting melodies. From this material, we selected promising melodies for the chorus and verses and made them into a song, adding suitable chords. A vocalist provided the sorrowful human touch that the song needed, while our producer used music production software to add a guitar and bass accompaniment, and an AI-generated drum track. The images on this page were generated with Snowpixel, using the title as a prompt.
Lyrics
Evening's come, let’s go to bed
Oh let me be, a little sad
I'm just a fragment of your soul
But when you're near me, you make me whole
I look at you,
We’re far apart
Oh, come closer
To my heart
We share a bed, from time to time
But I could never call you mine
You’re the earth and I'm a bird up high
Free to fly alone, up in your sky
I look at you,
We’re far apart
Oh, come closer
To my heart
I've been mistaken all my life
For an ordinary girl
There's nothing wrong with that
I set out to be unforgettable
But I’m changing my mind
Don’t want to be an angel
Don't want to be a saint
I'm just an average woman
Just a lonely woman in love with you
Who has never had a chance
I look at you,
We’re far apart
Oh, come closer
To my heart