Germany - Dadabots x Portrait XO

In every edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, there is one participant that takes an unusual approach. At the AI Song Contest, this could be Dadabots x Portrait XO, working from an artist residency in Berlin but originally from the United States. This trio consists of Portrait XO, an artist experimenting with AI and new media; Zack Zukowski, an expert in machine learning who plays no fewer than five musical instruments; and CJ Carr, a deep learning specialist in AI-generated metal, rock, and punk. Those genres are clearly reflected in their song. All three group members are connected to Factory Berlin, a community of innovators.

The team used a unique method to write the lyrics: they trained SampleRNN on 1950s acapellas, which generated nonsensical babbling, and tried to recognize words in it. And that's how I'll Marry You, Punk Come came into being. They heard a story emerge - human girl falls in love with AI boy during a severe epidemic: ‘Pareidolia [the act of seeing non-existent patterns in random data] comes around the corner and reveals our greatest dreams and fears.’

The rest of the lyrics were generated using a fake news generator, a singing synthesizer, English death metal lyrics, and supplemented with German text where possible, though the software does not support the German language. In order to get that typical metal sound, the sound from the duet between robot and human was edited, and words were scrapped here and there to get the rhythm right.

The arsenal of the song's melody-generating tools included MusicAutobot, for creating pop choruses, and Coconet, for baroque reharmonization. In all, the final song used seven neural nets, with AI mainly serving to invent lyrics, audio, and midi for the team to curate: ‘That way, it's much more fun. It feels like hunting and gathering.’