ABOUT THE TEAM

5Seven records is an experimental DIY record label originally started in Tijuana Mexico. We sell our releases at cost and just try to have fun and do weird stuff. We have put out albums on many different formats like 8-tracks, reel to reel, floppy discs, NES cartridges...etc. We love music and we love technology so we decided to experiment with new technologies to create music with software.

We create stuff we like, even if for the most part that means they are niche projects without mainstream acceptance.

ABOUT THE SONG

ENGULF is actually Chapter 4 of the 6 part Punk Rock Opera OBROIION 01. To make this album we simply asked the AI to tell us the story of how robots would destroy the human race and take over the planet. Given the ferociously aggressive nature of the response, it was obvious to us that the story needed to be told through 1970s punk rock, and that each song should be told from the perspective of one of the two dueling main characters: the humans and the robots. Us, and them. This song includes a narrated introduction to the song plus the song, which is told from the perspective of the humans.

ABOUT THE HUMAN-AI CO-CREATION PROCESS

This song (and album) was generated through the use of various free yet advanced technologies. Below are the different elements along with the technologies used. Story & Lyrics - OpenAi GPT-3, Music Audio - Jukebox AI, Text To Speech - ttsmp3.com, Album Artwork & Band Images - GAN Models.

The first challenge was to obtain both an interesting storyline and subsequent lyrics based on this broad concept of “robots taking over the world”. For this piece we decided to turn to Open-AI’s GPT-3 software, which generated the majority of the content for this project. After generating the project's content (storyline & lyrics) we needed to give life to the content by way of actual audio files. First we used pretty basic text-to-speech software to generate audio files for the narrated chapter introductions. For the music audio files we turned to OpenAI’s Jukebox technology. There is a detailed description of the process we took to create the album on OBROIION.com. That includes screenshots, links to google colab notebooks, examples of the GPT-3 prompts that were used, and detailed instructions on each part of the process.

In the spirit of the iconic punk quote “this is a chord, this is another, this is a third. Now form a band” (from punk fanzine Sideburn #1), we wanted to be very transparent about what tools and steps we took to create this project. Replicating a project like this would not be very difficult. The projects main creators are not computer scientists that had to code complex software to create this project. Most of the tools used are relatively simple, and can be figured out with a little bit of elbow grease. They are also generally available to the public free of cost. We hope this project results in many far superior experiments.