ABOUT THE TEAM

Karine Miras is an AI postdoc researcher at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, but also a musician (voice, piano, and guitar) and a poet. In the AI Song Contest she is finally able to combine all her passions.

ABOUT THE SONG

The instrumental tracks of this song were fully composed by an AI, without any human edition, except looping it and adding the vocals. Importantly, this AI was never trained on existing music datasets. In fact, the algorithm is deaf, having never listened to music, and composing original music based only on musical theory and human feedback.

ABOUT THE HUMAN-AI CO-CREATION PROCESS

My musician AI is called AJ, and it is an Evolutionary Algorithm (EA). An EA has a population of solutions (in this case songs) that evolve through Darwinian natural selection to become better and better. Importantly, the criteria of what is “good” is defined by a human user iteratively:

1) the algorithm composes a set of songs,

2) the user rates the songs,

3) the algorithm recomposes the songs based on the human feedback.

The process ends when the human is satisfied with the compositions. The instrumentals of our song Sem amor were FULLY algorithmically generated by AJ, and I interfered only by rating songs iteratively during the composition process. After we (me and AJ) “discovered” a song together that was inspiring for me, I worked on the lyrics and vocals. AJ is fundamental to my creative process because often I have the feeling that I wanna compose something, but feel blocked and have no inspiration. When this happens, I play with AJ until something inspiring emerges from our interaction. This was the case with the song Sem amor, and I hope you like it.