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Can artificial intelligence help compose a song that is just as successful as last year’s hit by Duncan Laurence? In the AI Song Contest teams from all over Europe and Australia compete attempting to create the next Eurovision hit with the help of artificial intelligence. Can computers blow us away with their creative power?

In the AI Song Contest, teams of musicians, artists, scientists and programmers explore the creative power of artificial intelligence (AI) and the influence AI will have on the music industry in the future. A total of 13 teams from Australia, Sweden, Belgium, The UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and The Netherlands competed in the first edition.

Between 10 April and 10 May 2020 you can listen and vote for all songs on this website. Which song earns your douze points? Note: it is no longer possible to vote.

A panel of AI experts will evaluate the songs on AI level. The panel consists of Vincent Koops (NL), Senior Data Scientist at RTL and composer, Anna Huang (US), leading AI researcher in music generation, and Ed Newton-Rex (UK), Composer and Director at the AI lab at ByteDance.

The winner is announced on 12 May 2020.

The AI Song Contest is an online project organised by Dutch public broadcaster VPRO in collaboration with NPO Innovation and NPO 3FM.

The AI Song Contest is a public project researching the creative abilities of AI and its impact on us as musical animals. For this contest, various teams investigate the recipe for a great Eurovision song by trying to generate a new one. To generate new music, AI models (just like a human composer) have to 'listen' to large amounts of existing music (data) before it can generate meaningful musical ideas. Therefore the teams will work with existing data and newly-created data.

If you have any questions about the AI Song Contest, please send us an email: aisongcontest@vpro.nl.

Karen van Dijk (idea and editor)
Sharon Yosef (production)
Jonathan Maas (research and editorial)

YouTube series
Daan Veldhuizen (direction, camera, edit)
Chiel Aldershoff (sound)

Eva Koreman (voice over)

Jona Hofman (sound mix)
Hens Zimmerman (voice over technique)
Rieks Soepenberg (additional camera)

VPRO online
Jim Schulpen
Willem Kort
Thomas van Manen

Communication
Maud Nass
Maike Dubelaar

AI expert panel
Vincent Koops (lead)
Ed Newton-Rex 
Anna Huang

AI consultant
Vincent Koops

Creative consultant
Nim Shapira

Team 3FM
Robbert-Jan van de Velde
Nina Milder
Thera Visser
Marceline van Os

Design
Ivo van Aart
Frederik Vorderhake

Thanks to
Egon Verharen (NPO Innovation)
Stefano Salluci (EBU)

Special thanks to all AI Song Contest participants and their boundless enthusiasm to explore the creative margins of artificial intelligence. And team Can AI Kick It who gave insight into their working process for the YouTube series.