By akademiotoelektronik, 14/04/2022

Music: will your next idol be an artificial intelligence?

Since Friday, a strange album, called "Hello World" and signed by the Skygge collective, has been intriguing the world of music, with its sounds ranging from dance to jazz. Its particularity: it is the first "mainstream" record composed by (or with the help of) an artificial intelligence.

Listening to the Hello World album by the SKYGGE collective gives a funny feeling. In this mixture of sounds, voices and influences, what is human? What comes from a computer? If the question isn't completely absurd, it's because Hello World is an album composed using artificial intelligence.

And it is even the first of the name, according to its initiators: even if it is not completely exact, this disc is indeed the first to be both entirely composed with this computer tool and to leave the field of music. experimental. Because until now, music composed using artificial intelligence looked more like this:

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Or this, when Google got into it last year:

Music everyone can listen to

With Hello World, it is indeed a question of a "mainstream" music album, in the sense that it is easily heard by all. And it is clear: without knowing beforehand that a computer program is hidden behind, difficult to guess. And this even if something sows doubt, without knowing exactly whether it is the sometimes surprising harmonies or the voices which seem to be cut out and reconstituted.

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Behind this SKYGGE project (which means "shadow" in Danish), hide the scientist François Pachet, specialized in computer music, and the composer Benoît Carré (also known for being half of the Lilicub group or the author of the last song by Michel Sardou). And a certain "Flow Machine", the famous artificial intelligence. This is not the humanoid robot you may have thought of: it is a "simple" set of software developed by Sony's French experimental laboratory, capable of composing a score on its own, to add an arrangement to it, and to mix everything.

Software powered by thousands of songs

In concrete terms, how does that work ? In fact, this software works like any machine, with a raw material and an end product. But - and this is its great particularity - this raw material is made up of tens of thousands of arrangements, songs and above all scores, which have enabled the software to understand (without knowing anything about music) that generally, after such a musical chord, the composers put such and such a chord, and that on these chords they generally play such and such a type of musical note. This is called "machine learning", and it also works for images, for example.

The software therefore makes it possible to propose a score, to find which instruments will play it and with what style, drawing inspiration from other recordings. But the final choice is left to the user of the software: behind this device, there is always a musician. This is the choice made by François Pachet and Benoît Carré: to entrust "Flow Machine" to experienced musicians, so that they can use it as a musical instrument. "For there to be a work of art, you need an intention, a desire, a motor, it's the artist who does that, but he will be helped by technology", explained François Pachet to the newspaper 20 minutes.

The final leg, that of the musician

Each collaborator of the collective therefore chose the pieces from which he wished to draw inspiration and submitted them to the software, which made them a proposal. It is then up to them to edit the proposal, to review the arrangement, the mixing, sometimes to add vocal extracts, to arrive at the final result, the one you hear on the disc. Thus, for example, "Hello Shadow, composed by Stromae, is very inspired by Cape Verdean music", explains François Pachet. And the Belgian then asked the Canadian singer Kiesza to come and add a text to the song, also passed through the software to make it stick to the melody.

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For the time being, therefore, there is little chance of seeing your favorite artists disappear in favor of robot musicians who will have listened to more musical titles in a few hours than you have in a lifetime. On the other hand, the probability exists of seeing this software arrive in recording studios in addition to the good old musical instruments: last year, singer Taryn Southern used similar software to design the accompaniment of songs whose she had written the music and the lyrics.

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Next project of the Flow Records label, which has decided to specialize in these albums co-created by an AI: a new Beatles album. Or in any case a record that lets you imagine what the band's music would be like in 2018, if it still existed.

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