Music artists can find inspiration and new creative directions for their songs due to interfacing with technology.
From: University of Waterloo [Ontario,
Canada]
August
10, 2021 -- LyricJam, a real-time system that uses artificial intelligence (AI)
to generate lyric lines for live instrumental music, was created by members of
the University's Natural Language Processing Lab.
The lab, led by Olga Vechtomova, a
Waterloo Engineering professor cross-appointed in Computer Science, has been
researching creative applications of AI for several years.
The lab's initial work led to the
creation of a system that learns musical expressions of artists and generates
lyrics in their style.
Recently, Vechtomova, along with
Waterloo graduate students Gaurav Sahu and Dhruv Kumar, developed technology
that relies on various aspects of music such as chord progressions, tempo and
instrumentation to synthesize lyrics reflecting the mood and emotions expressed
by live music.
As a musician or a band plays
instrumental music, the system continuously receives the raw audio clips, which
the neural network processes to generate new lyric lines. The artists can then
use the lines to compose their own song lyrics.
"The purpose of the system is not
to write a song for the artist," Vechtomova explains. "Instead, we
want to help artists realize their own creativity. The system generates poetic
lines with new metaphors and expressions, potentially leading the artists in
creative directions that they haven't explored before."
The neural network designed by the
researchers learns what lyrical themes, words and stylistic devices are
associated with different aspects of music captured in each audio clip.
For example, the researchers observed
that lyrics generated for ambient music are very different than those for
upbeat music.
The research team conducted a user
study, inviting musicians to play live instruments while using the system.
"One unexpected finding was that
participants felt encouraged by the generated lines to improvise,"
Vechtomova said. "For example, the lines inspired artists to structure
chords a bit differently and take their improvisation in a new direction than
originally intended. Some musicians also used the lines to check if their
improvisation had the desired emotional effect."
Another finding from the study
highlighted the co-creative aspect of the experience. Participants commented
that they viewed the system as an uncritical jamming partner and felt
encouraged to play their musical instruments even if they were not actively
trying to write lyrics.
Since LyricJam went live in June this
year, over 1,500 users worldwide have tried it out.
The team's research, to be presented at
the International Conference on Computations Creativity this September, has
been pre-published on arXiv. Musicians interested in trying out LyricJam can
access it at https://lyricjam.ai.
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