Germany - OVGneUrovision

OVGneUrovision is a one-man team consisting of Richhiey Thomas, from Mumbai, India, living in Magdeburg, Germany. He is studying there for a master’s in data and knowledge engineering at Germany’s newest higher education institution, the Otto von Guericke University in his hometown, where he spends a lot of his time in the AI lab. His motivation for participating in the AI Song Contest was simple: to have fun, experimenting to make the different parts of a song, and then fitting them together into a coherent whole. He began the project as a result of his interest in the interfaces between music and computer science.

It was the first time Thomas had created a song, and he lacked any training in composition. He started the process by watching large numbers of songwriting YouTube tutorials to understand the creative process.

The IT side of the story was obviously Thomas’s natural domain, and he created Traveller in Time by creatively linking several systems, such as Google Magenta, which he says offers very rich possibilities. He built up his song section by section, using his intuition to select what felt and sounded good. He has been able to creatively link all the systems and merge them into one. The drums come from Google Creative Lab’s neural drum machine, while Magenta MusicVAE came up with the bassline for the track. 

Thomas says AI certainly helped him make music. ‘I know what a song should sound like, but I can't just play it on a piano. With the AI-generated notes, I can do that.' But he insists it's still a collaboration: AI can help with the creative aspect, but not make a complete song.

One striking thing about this entry is that it’s completely instrumental. Thomas's ambition was to make a track that made people tap their feet, while having a bit of a dreamy vibe.