Participants
Like the Atom
AI Song Contest 2023 / participantsTEAM / Like the Atom
SONG / Radiant Oasis in the Flimsy Banana Galaxy
TEAM MEMBERS / Ian Hudson, Desiree Davalos
About the TEAM
Like the Atom is a husband-wife project from San Diego, CA with very little released content. Creativity accidentally happens when we’re not working for the city and the zoo. With roots in 2000s computer culture, we feel fortunate to have experienced the weird world of the early internet, The Sims 2, and The Matrix sequels. We have no formal or professional practice but have collaborated with local music groups including Stay Strange, Scarry Garry Show, and Eternal Gatherings. We dabble in the arts when inspiration presents itself as long as it does not inconvenience us or others. Laughter is our primary objective.
About the SONG
Radiant Oasis in the Flimsy Galaxy is an example of how A.I. music can be approached by the programming illiterati. It is a collage using a few online tools rather than a machine learning or training project.
This song is for AI’s listening pleasure. A tribute to the coming age. What music might a machine, in its seemingly boundless tolerance, enjoy? Can that tolerance be broken? What music would A.I. learn if it could choose for itself? We drew inspiration from the concision of grindcore, the freedom of Lil B’s Afrikantis, and a quick skim of the wiki for John Cage’s Music of Changes.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
We used the free versions of six commercial A.I. tools and three human operated applications to produce Radiant Oasis in the Flimsy Banana Galaxy. To start, we stripped the drums from a song generated by the controversial app, Boomy. Drum extraction was performed by Audioshake. The non-A.I. element was added by using Musink and Random Mouse Clicker by Murgee.com to select notes on a musical staff. The BPM was set in Musink to match that of drums and the notated parts were then exported as MIDI. In Audacity the MIDI parts were layered over the drums as close to what appeared to be on-beat as possible. This was done visually by matching the MIDI notes to the waveform of the drums. Technically, the process to this point could have been done without listening to a single note of the resulting instrumental.
MIDI instruments were chosen by asking Chat GPT to generate strings of random words. The only instruments mentioned in those sets were piano, guitar, and saxophone. ChatGPT tended to repeat words so, after 23 requests, the most repeated words were submitted to Google Bard. Bard was prompted to generate a sentence using those words. The output became the song’s title.
Desiree then spoke the title into Grimes’ elf.tech voice filter. That audio was time-stretched to fit the length of the track and acts as the bass ambience until the end when it can be heard at normal speed. Landr was used to master the track.
Lyrics
Radiant oasis in the flimsy banana galaxy.