Participants 2022
Yaboi Hanoi
AI Song Contest 2022 / participantsTEAM / Yaboi Hanoi
SONG / อสุระเทวะชุมนุม - Enter Demons & Gods (“Asura Deva Choom Noom”)
TEAM MEMBERS / Lamtharn “Hanoi” Hantrakul
About the TEAM
ญาบอย ฮานอย “Yaboi Hanoi” is challenging culture from Southeast Asia through dance music with a twist of tech. Over half a million viewers tuned into “IFFY Remix: Thai Dance Reimagined”, his shortform music series with Thai dance troupe Kid Buak Sipp and R&B artist Dorsh this past February 2022. He was recently selected by Nusasonic and the Goethe Institute as one of 20 artists featured in Khyam Allami’s Common Tonalities album. His track ชิงชัย “Ching Chai” was based on an analysis of tunings and scales from the South of Thailand through new music technogies and modern bass music. Yaboi Hanoi is the Bangkok-born musical brainchild of Lamtharn “Hanoi” Hantrakul; fusing his unique background as a composer, award-winning Cultural Technologist and Audio AI Research Scientist.
About the SONG
Imagine a demon blowing into a musical instrument. What would it sound like? In Thai mythology, a famous scene portrays hundreds of demons and gods descending upon the ocean to churn an elixir of immortality. This track depicts the earth-shattering arrival of these two forces. The melodies and sound design were inspired by the ปี่ “Phi”, a piercing reeded instrument that permeates Thai sonic culture. By using audio AI tools to synthesize and precisely tune bass music to tuning systems unique to the Phi, a live performer can instantly jam out to this track in native scales during a live set. The song reflects my verve for ways AI can empower Southeast Asian instruments, both real and AI generated, to become a part of modern musical culture, whilst respecting fundamental aspects of tradition like native tunings and melodic inflections.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
This track celebrates how recent audio machine learning can analyze, synthesize and empower music from Southeast Asia with respect to a culture’s native tuning and motifs. Historically, music AI has been limited to Western genres like classical, rock and pop music. These state-of-the-art models for Bach, Bieber and the Beatles are often difficult to apply to music from my home region. Melodies from many parts of Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa do not follow the same western scales and tunings assumed by most music AI systems.
Instead of representing music as notes (symbolic AI), we can model music as frequencies (audio AI). Advancements in AI-based pitch detection, make it possible to analyze melodies and inflections measured in Hertz (Hz) from instruments like the Thai Phi with unprecedented accuracy. This pitch data can then be resynthesized into new sounds through technologies I co-developed including Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP), Tone Transfer and the new VST plugin MAWF. These AI tools empower me to make music inspired by my home traditions, in new ways that no longer compromise the tunings and motifs at the heart of Southeast Asian musical cultures. A variety of additional AI tools including Magenta Studio and drum synthesis via diffusion models power this transcultural fusion of AI Bass music and Phi repertoire from Thailand.