TridecatoNICS
AI Song Contest 2021 / participantsTEAM / TridecatoNICS
SONG / Feijão de Corda (String Beans)
TEAM MEMBERS / Tiago Fernandes Tavares, Fernanda Esteves Coelho Chaves, Leonardo Vilela de Abreu Silva Pereira
LISTEN AND EVALUATE Feijão de Corda (String Beans)
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 a part of a research group in Music and Artificial Intelligence at the University of Campinas. Our technical background is in Engineering, and each of the group’s participants has a different musical background, making TridecatoNICS a union of experimental electronics, Brazilian popular music, and European classical music. This was the first time we composed music together, and the first time each one of us used AI in a collective creation endeavor.
We all have a shared appreciation for a particularly beautiful road in Brazil that goes from South to North following the short land strip in which the mountains meet the ocean. We also like Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, whose poetry inspired our song.
ABOUT THE SONG
Our song is based on a poem by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa. It is about how humans try so hard to find meaning in the passing of time and the way nature works, but nature and time themselves do not have any intrinsic meaning. It is in a style that joins our background: a bit of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB), some influences from orchestral music, and a bit of experimental freedom. We composed the song in web-conferences, because we cannot meet in person, and each one recorded their parts at home. The polyrhythms in the rhythm section are the outcomes of a GAN that “learned” rhythm by studying a textbook, and the lyrics had the participation of an image recognition AI that helped us to find interesting metaphors for our story. The other song parts were entirely composed by humans.
ABOUT THE HUMAN-AI CO-CREATION PROCESS
The most interesting part of using AI was when we started drawing Fernando Pessoas’ poem’s stanzas, and then used an image recognition AI (DoodleNet) to generate labels from our drawings. Then, we used DoodleNet’s labels as metaphors for the story we wanted to tell. This was incredibly fun, not only because DoodleNet tends to give unexpected (as in: if this was a classification problem, it would be completely wrong) results, but also because we used these shared metaphors to create a story that could be shared by all the group, that is, we are all co-authors of the story because no one was attached to their own metaphors in the lyrics. This idea came because we started by using GANs (and we did use the outcome for the rhythm section), but it felt more like operating machines and doing computer science tasks than composing music (essentially: go home, change dataset/parameters, press “go”, return in a few hours, repeat until satisfied). The dynamics using DoodleNet actually put computers in the place of making us interact better, instead of taking the place of our interaction.
LYRICS
Portuguese
Na beira da estrada ao redor da praia
morava uma moça que rastelava o chão.
Ela plantava ervilhas e feijão de corda
e todos os invernos eu a ajudava.
Quando eu ia embora
vinham as andorinhas
e depois, chegavam as tartarugas marinhas,
e a moça costurava essas idas e vindas inexoráveis
numa colcha de retalhos de destinos.
Ela tinha saudades de quando eu chovia na praia
E a saudade é um mal de quem se recorda
De uma antiga estação
Em uma colcha de retalhos
E ficavam ervilhas e feijão de corda
Num ciclo infinito de esperança e realidade
O rastelo marca as linhas
E deixa viva a ambiguidade
Do crescimento das gavinhas
Com seu destino entalhado
No chão, rastela a linha
dessa colcha de retalhos
Que vai costurar sozinha
English
Near the road, around the beach,
lived a woman who raked the ground.
She planted peas and string beans,
and I helped her every winter,
When I left, came the birds,
and then, the sea turtles,
and the lady sewed these unavoidable comings and goings in a patchwork blanket.
She missed times when I rained in the beach
and “missing” is a disease for those who remember
an old season
in a patchwork blanket
and all that remains are peas and string beans.
In an infinite cycle of hope and reality
the rake scratches lines in the ground
and brings to life the ambiguity
in the growth of the tendrils
With her carved fate
in the ground, she rakes the line
of the patchwork blanket
she will sew alone