From The New York Times
Robots Can Make Music, but Can They Sing?
Malcolm Jack
LONDON — For its first 30 seconds, the song “Listen to Your Body Choir” is a lilting pop tune, with a female voice singing over gentle piano. Then, everything starts to fracture, as twitchy beats and samples fuse with bizarre lyrics like “Do the cars come with push-ups?” and a robotic voice intertwines with the human sound.
The transition is intended to evoke the song’s co-writer: artificial intelligence.
“Listen to Your Body Choir,” which won this year’s A.I. Song Contest, was produced by M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D., a California-based team of musicians, scholars and A.I. experts. They instructed machines to “continue” the melody and lyrics of “Daisy Bell,” Harry Dacre’s tune from 1892 that became, in 1961, commonly known as the first song to be sung using computer speech synthesis. The result in “Listen to Your Body Choir” is a track that sounds both human and machine-made...
I School doctoral student Jon Gillick and postdoctoral scholar Matt Sims are members of the winning team “M.O.G.I.I.7.E.D.”
