The Netherlands - Can AI Kick It

Team Can AI kick it discovered that AI can have fairly subversive, anarchist and revolutionary tendencies. The Lyrics Generator, built by team member Janne Spijkervet, came up with phrases like ‘We want revolution, kill the government, kill the system!’. Did that happen because the Generator’s training was based on texts from online forum Reddit? Whatever the case may be, is ‘kill the government’ a useful lyric? After the initial shock-and-awe wears off, do you still want to sing such incendiary words?

The team decided to compromise: the AI and artist Willie Wartaal would do a duet. As the song goes on, Wartaal sounds increasingly robotic, as if his voice melts together with the AI, until we get to the inflammatory end of track. By then, the AI has taken over completely and is leading the revolution, so to speak.

When team Can AI kick it, which consists of people who work for several Dutch universities, got together for the first time, it turned out that team member Arran Lyon had already developed a system with a musical generation algorithm based on neural networks. The team used this system as the jumping off point for their process.

The self learning system studied a data set consisting of 5000 pop songs and 250 Eurovision tracks. On the other hand, Anja Volk, Iris Ren and several master students from Utrecht University contributed melodies from a deep learning model trained on both the Eurovision Tracks and songs from the Meertens Liederenbank, a database holding a wide variety of Dutch folk songs - from national anthem Wilhelmus to Henry’s student drinking game from 1833 and famous college anthem “lo vivat”.

To make the algorithm even more effective, Ashley Burgoyne’s Eurovision Hit Predictor was used; this system is based on research about the key elements of a catchy melody and applies that knowledge to Eurovision tracks. Arran Lyon’s AI system created hundreds of melodies and bass lines, which were then fed to the Eurovision Hit Predictor to determine their catchiness. 

After AI provided options for both lyrics and melodies, composing the song came down to putting all the elements together. Janne Spijkervet and Willie Wartaal were in charge of composition. Together, they decided on urban and poppy as the song’s sound. A human choice, made without AI intervention. Putting the AI-generated musical and lyrical puzzle pieces together was also a completely human endeavor. ‘We really did a collab with AI.’