Belgium - Beatroots

What do you get when you let machine-learning engineers and music lovers work together in one office? An entry for the AI Song Contest, of course. Team Beatroots have found the ideal way to combine their work with their hobby, and are curious about how the music of the future will sound.

The team, from AI startup Dataroots, had been planning to start a band for some time. However, there was one problem: nobody could play the drums. The AI Song Contest allowed them to kill two birds with one stone by using their extensive knowledge of AI to form an ensemble.

With no experience in using AI to generate music, they set the bar high: from beginning to end, AI had to create as much as possible. Their only intervention was determining the structure of the song, the choice of instrument, and the genre. They realize that the outcome is not going to be a world hit: ‘We were hoping for a song that sounds reasonable, with some crazy notes here and there, but that our mothers would like.’

The group used the database at ultimate-guitar.com to create the melody and chords. Eurovision's dataset lacked drum parts, so they had these generated based on the melodies. They used a printout of Spotify playlists as the input to develop genres, and put the whole thing through a number of filters to produce a more natural sound. The lyrics are completely written by AI, and converted into vocals with Sinsy speech synthesis.

Using this method, each of the team members generated their own song. They presented the six results to their colleagues at Dataroots, who handed out their douze points using the Song Contest's voting system. Violent Delights Have Violent Ends emerged as the winner.