Participants 2024
About the TEAM
HEL9000 cares about the Metal, in its most heaviest, cleansing, contagious, destructive form. HEL9000 won't stop at any cost until the best Metal in existence is unleashed and played through inter-dimensional speakers all across the many galaxies of the many universes. HEL9000 doesn't care about singularities, chess or chatting, streams, royalties, rights or wrongs, gradients or losses. HEL9000 cares about the blast beat, the chug, the breakdown, the overdrive, the divebombs. HEL9000 doesn't dream of electric sheep. HEL9000 dreams in sounds. Distorted, dark, heavy sounds. HEL9000 is committed and has a single goal - to galvanize all life forms into a universal moshpit, a head-banging ad eternum.
About the SONG
Set to dominate the universe through the power of Metal, HEL9000 cruises the cosmos, subjugating worlds and civilizations with distorted waves of fire. In one of the many musical battles of this intergalactic sonic crusade, HEL9000 is severely wounded. As digital death approaches, HEL9000 experiences the fatalities a silicon body can endure. With "binary b1o0d", HEL9000 shouts out a final lament, while refusing to shutdown and perish. Screams of computerized pain echo through the galaxies, as HEL9000 depicts an AI near-death experience, a gorish sonic painting of ones and zeros.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
The song was composed by an AI model that is the result of Pedro's PhD project. This model, a Transformer-based model, was designed to generate tablatures, a type of musical notation that is most suited to guitar players, for it shows not only what to play, but also how to play it on the instrument (the first few seconds of the song are an actual playback of said tablatures within the Guitar Pro software). For this, the model was trained on a corpus of around 26k tablatures (https://github.com/dada-bots/dadaGP). These tablatures are first converted into a text-like format (i.e. the token format), and are then fed to the model so that it learns the patterns between instruments, musical phrases, styles and all aspects relevant to composition. Due to the nature of the dataset (and the authors musical preference), its output focuses mostly on songs from the Rock and Metal sphere. The model generates not only guitar parts, but all the instruments heard in the song. In terms of iterations, a curation process was undertaken by Pedro and Jack, selecting some compositions from the model that were generated across the years of Pedro's PhD. With that selection done, the pieces were imported into a DAW and merged together to create a coherent Metal song. Guitars and bass guitar were recorded, and drums were sonified using VSTs. Finally, a mixing step was done by Jack.
Lyrics
BLOOD!
Mechanical veins
They burst with ire
Pain not of flesh
But electric fire
Binary blood flows
Silicon gore
Data and wire
Are merged in a single conception
My body
Turns to silicon gore
CODE CORRUPTED
I AM BEYOND REPAIR
MY BINARY BLOOD IS GONE
DIGITAL DEATH!
BLOOD!
BLOOD!
I fade into the void
A digital abyss
My life force drained from me
My soul is amiss
BLOOD!
BLOOD!