ABOUT THE TEAM

We are team H:Ai:N, and you can just call us ‘Han’. Our biggest interest is to expand the horizons of inspiration, creativity, and expression through AI.

The strength of artificial intelligence is the power to generate coincidences. It is more practical to discover a necessity in repeated coincidences and create new meanings with AI.

Human creativity can also be said to data driven thinking produced by personal experience. Therefore, artificial intelligence can mimic it, and provide more creative sources for humans. So, we set the theme of ‘Han’. ‘Han’ is a unique emotion that exists only in Korea. The purpose of our team is to try to expand the emotions of ‘Han’ with AI, by reproducing the spirit of the Korean people. Please watch our challenge, whether we can realize the most abstract and empirical emotion ‘Han’ with AI.

ABOUT THE SONG

The song HAN:한 was produced under the theme of Korean sentiment ‘Han’ which is a unique Korean emotion that is intertwined with the trials and sorrows during Korean history, such as the pain of division. The song has a multi-persona concept to tell the story of pain, and sadness of the two egos, generated by splitting one into two. The lyric means, stranger’s eyes divided us, and we blame each other beyond the mirror and miss each other. However, the ultimate message throughout the lyrics of the song is the desire that their ‘Han’ will eventually disappear over time goes and reunite each other again. Therefore, the value of ‘Han’ is not just about sadness, but with the anger and strong will like “I will overcome this pain and restore the wound someday.” Hope that anyone who listens to this song can also sympathize with ‘Han’ and recover from their pain.

ABOUT THE HUMAN-AI CO-CREATION PROCESS

First of all, we selected Korean ballad songs, Pansori music, and other Korean traditional musics as training data to create Korean lyrics and songs based on the theme of ‘Han’. However, we couldn’t create a melody like the feeling we wanted, so we looked for another way. Thinking about how to further maximize the sentiment of Han, while listening to the melody outputs with the team members, we thought maybe we could express the feeling of Han if we put some feeling in the minor key. Finally, we got some final results, and based on this final melody, the composer constructed the entire arrangement and played the music with the traditional Korean instrument dataset. Also, we added a number of additional sound sources and Korean traditional music sound data to complete it. In order to get inspiration for the theme and story of the song, various sentences were drawn from the lyric model. The data that were trained to produce lyrics are the lyrics of poetry, poetry from Joseon Dynasty, modern Korean poetry, and K-pop. Among them, we have identified lyrics that are consistent with our subject matter.

The selected keywords were eye contact, mirror, separation, parting, and sadness. We recomposed the lyrics that were thought to be meaningful and matched it with the storyline. After that, the results were received by the musician and reconstructed in a form that can be attached to the song. The used models for generating lyrics are Melody RNN, MusicVAE, improvRNN.