STHLM
AI Song Contest 2021 / participantsTEAM / STHLM
SONG / Evigt Förlorad (Forever Lost)
TEAM MEMBERS / Bob L. T. Sturm, Daniel Näsström, Lisa Huge, Disklavier.
LISTEN AND EVALUATE Evigt Förlorad (Forever Lost)
The lines are now closed. You can no longer vote. Watch the Award Ceremony on July 6 to find out which song wins the AI Song Contest 2021!
LYRICS AND MORE ABOUT THIS ENTRY BELOW
ABOUT THE TEAM
We are three amateur musicians based in Stockholm, Sweden. Bob teaches machine learning at the technical university (KTH), and sometimes plays Ai-generated folk music on his accordion during lectures. Daniel is a daytime accountant and nighttime flute player, dreamer and music instruments enthusiast. Lisa sells machine learning solutions for risk analyses, but in the spare time explores different kinds of singing, from sacred music to metal.
ABOUT THE SONG
Our entry began as a comedy but became a tragedy due to the right kind of failure of a simple music generation system, and a team member’s idea of facing a sad experience that is still very raw. The song is a lament to Bob’s puppy Smootzieg, who died on her six-month birthday after escaping from her harness and running into a busy road. Bob says, “The extent to which I could engage emotionally with this painful event was prompting the GPT-2 model with the situation, and then curating the lines that expressed how I felt and fit the melody. I feel that Ai provided me a path for a journey that would have required too much courage to do alone”.
ABOUT THE HUMAN-AI CO-CREATION PROCESS
Our first thought was to use a fun output of folk-rnn (v1) titled, “The Cuckoo’s Wedding”. We explored using the Music Transformer for the accompaniment, e.g., here. We just needed a singable melody and lyrics. We tried using GPT-2 for the lyrics, which Daniel found to be “the most challenging and frustrating part since so much that was created was pure nonsense and I find lyrics and stories very personal and human.”
While writing a conference paper, Bob happened upon a nice melody generated by folk-rnn (v2) that was deemed a failure by an artificial critic he engineered for the Ai Music Generation Challenge 2020. This melody can be heard here. We modified and combined this melody with “The Cuckoo’s Wedding” and submitted it to the Music Transformer to create an accompaniment. We then decided to drop the wedding idea, and focus instead on the melody. Bob proposed making a lament to his dog Smootzieg, and then worked with GPT-2 to create lyrics. Daniel translated the lyrics into Swedish. Bob transcribed the Music Transformer accompaniment and set up a Yamaha Disklavier piano to play it.
We then met to record each part separately, first the piano, then vocals (Lisa), accordion (Bob) and finally fiddle (Daniel). Daniel made adjustments to tuning in certain places, added some reverberation, and finally submitted the track to applied LANDR for the final mastering.
A behind the scenes documentation can be found on Twitter.
LYRICS
[A1]
När vi vände hemåt, gick allting så fort / Där vid vägens kant, var den sista gången vi sågs / Vad ska vi nu göra, vår värld är ej sig lik / Vårt barn, vår ängel borta är, vi minns dig såsom igår
[On the way home, our baby girl flew / So she's gone, never to be found, our baby girl flew. / What are we to do? This world that we've built? / This child, our angel, our baby girl, the world that we've built?]
[B1]
Hon var bara sex måna'r gammal, Lilla tjej! (när) / En galning ryckte bort vår kära vän Evigt förlorad / Nyss hon lärt sig springa som vinden, Lilla tjej! (när) / En galning ryckte bort vår kära vän Evigt förlorad
[She was only six months old / An idiot flew our little girl the fuck away / So she is gone, never to be found / An idiot flew our little girl the fuck away]
(C1)
Utan en chans, för den bilen bara körde, och Vi får aldrig veta, vad hon skulle blivit
[Never stopped, the car never stopped / We will never know what it'll take to raise her.]
(A2)
Vad ska vi nu göra, vår värld är ej sig lik / Vårt barn, vår ängel borta är, vi minns dig såsom igår
[What are we to do? This world that we've built? / This child, our angel, our baby girl, the world that we've built?]
(B2)
Hon var bara sex måna'r gammal, Lilla tjej! (när) / En galning ryckte bort vår kära vän Evigt förlorad / Hon älskade att sitta i solen, Lilla tjej! (när) / En galning ryckte bort vår kära vän Evigt förlorad
[She had just learned to run like the wind, at six months old, / But an idiot flew our little girl the fuck away. / She loved to sit in the sun with her toys, at six months old, / But an idiot flew our little girl the fuck away.]
(C2)
Utan en chans, för den bilen bara körde, och Vi får aldrig veta, vad hon skulle blivit
Utan en chans, för den bilen bara körde, och Vi får aldrig veta, vad hon skulle blivit
[Never stopped, the car never stopped / We will never know what it'll take to raise her.
Never stopped, the car never stopped / We will never know what it'll take to raise her.]
(A3)
När vi vände hemåt, gick allting så fort / Där vid vägens kant, var den sista gången vi sågs
[On the way home, our baby girl flew / So she's gone, never to be found, our baby girl flew.]