Slashdot Mirror
Two Technologists Create Black Metal Album Using An AI (theoutline.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Outline: Coditany of Timeness" is a convincing lo-fi black metal album, complete with atmospheric interludes, tremolo guitar, frantic blast beats and screeching vocals. But the record, which you can listen to on Bandcamp, wasn't created by musicians. Instead, it was generated by two musical technologists using a deep learning software that ingests a musical album, processes it, and spits out an imitation of its style. To create Coditany, the software broke "Diotima," a 2011 album by a New York black metal band called Krallice, into small segments of audio. Then they fed each segment through a neural network -- a type of artificial intelligence modeled loosely on a biological brain -- and asked it to guess what the waveform of the next individual sample of audio would be. If the guess was right, the network would strengthen the paths of the neural network that led to the correct answer, similar to the way electrical connections between neurons in our brain strengthen as we learn new skills.
Sorry, but did the person writing this story up actually listen to the thing? Not only are the songs totally indistinguishable, but they also suck. They are noise. The drums sound awful. The mix is harsh. The music, if you can call it that, is lame and boring. Granted, I don't have any familiarity with the Krallice album they used to train the AI - perhaps all those descriptors apply - but this hardly seems like any kind of real achievement. You could just slice up an existing black metal album into granules and then stick them all back together at random and achieve similar results.