Genius-in-genius-out: Song writing with machine learning and AI

Joel Gould
Faculty Center, SSU

Stevenson Hall 1300
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

All songs can be distilled to a progression of chords and lyrics. Songwriters almost always start their creative process melding these two elements, harmonic changes and words. On top of this foundation, they layer melody, voice, and emotion.

In this presentation, I will detail a proposed project in which students will use machine learning and artificial intelligence to develop a web-facing platform that allows people to collaborate with the best musicians and lyricists of the past to generate compelling new creative works.  As a proof of concept, I will share a demo song that I created using a low-tech prototype of this software, built and programmed entirely using functions in Google Sheets.  I will show my process of how I created a small database (Bob Dylan, Kate Tempest, Jay-Z, and the Beatles), “farmed” results generated by machine learning, and crafted them into a coherent new song.

I hope that this prototype and example will inspire students to imagine the possibilities of how artificial intelligence might be used to enhance our most human of qualities, like creativity, and how working together to build a more sophisticated, easier to use platform with a larger database could meaningfully contribute to the expression and understanding of our collective experience.