{"id":29327,"date":"2020-05-03T17:01:01","date_gmt":"2020-05-04T00:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/?p=29327"},"modified":"2020-05-04T20:14:59","modified_gmt":"2020-05-05T03:14:59","slug":"machine-learning-and-cover-songs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/archive\/2020\/05\/machine-learning-and-cover-songs","title":{"rendered":"Machine Learning and Cover Songs"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s nothing like a great cover.<\/p>\n<p>You&#8217;re rekindling angst at a Pearl Jam show and without any warning they <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=uM2UOJ4RlUg&#038;t=24m5s\">go right into a Beatles song<\/a>. You recognize some David Bowie lyrics on Spotify, and you discover it&#8217;s an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=mbxQ9bvdZgU\">unrecognizable version of Let&#8217;s Dance<\/a> by M. Ward. You listen to <a href=\"https:\/\/open.spotify.com\/album\/3bVDZOD7EnPkxludwZUidT\">Tiny Cities by Sun Kil Moon<\/a> several times before you even realize it&#8217;s an entire album of beautifully fermented Modest Mouse songs.<\/p>\n<p>How often have you thought to yourself, I would love to hear <strong>this person<\/strong> sing <strong>this other band&#8217;s song<\/strong> in <strong>their own style<\/strong>? For instance, I wish I could listen to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=fb0NBTAbehc\">Mike Doughty sing just about anything<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Over the past year or two, we&#8217;ve started to see artificial intelligence begin to approximate that dream (or nightmare, depending on your perspective). First it was <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=cQ54GDm1eL0\">eye-opening deep fake videos<\/a> of past presidents appearing to say things they never said, but now it&#8217;s moved on to much more creative and cool endeavors like <a href=\"https:\/\/openai.com\/blog\/jukebox\/\">OpenAI Jukebox<\/a>. You should read the full description on the site, but essentially they are training models to identify everything that goes into a song: instruments, lyrics, musical style, and a whole lot more. The models are primitive for now, but even at this early stage, they can start recombining things in interesting ways like having Ella Fitzgerald sing a Prince song but in the style of folk rock.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/blog\/images\/inline\/jukebox.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"1600\" height=\"1490\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I spent a good part of the weekend messing around in <a href=\"https:\/\/openai.com\/blog\/jukebox\/\">Jukebox<\/a>, and it&#8217;s mesmerizing. It really feels like the beginning of something big, and just as excitingly, something that could get orders of magnitude better within only a few years.<\/p>\n<p>When you listen to it, it almost feels like the first words of a child&#8230; or if you prefer, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=pfiyEsMOSu0\">first song from Jimmy Page<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>A lot of the stuff in the library is pretty rough, but here are some of the most interesting ones I found:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=788662597\">Frank Sinatra introducing Jukebox<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=789017689\">The Greatest Love of All by Whitney Houston re-arranged and sung as Bob Dylan<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=789019084\">U Can&#8217;t Touch This by M.C. Hammer re-arranged and sung as Earth, Wind, and Fire<\/a><\/li>\n<li>Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. A poem by Robert Frost. As read by <a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=804328609\">Dolly Parton<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=804304396\">Aretha Franklin<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=804303460\">Neil Diamond<\/a>, or <a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=804329095\">Billie Holiday<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>Some of them aren&#8217;t so much &#8220;good&#8221; as they are fascinating, like <a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=787786186\">this attempt at Brain Damage by Pink Floyd<\/a> which sounds like a singer who doesn&#8217;t know English trying to just sound out the words as best he can.<\/li>\n<li>Others come pretty close to the real thing, like these <a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=787976392\">Ray LaMontagne<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/jukebox.openai.com\/?song=787967215\">Ryan Adams<\/a> songs, which sound like they&#8217;ve just had a few too many whiskeys.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Everything feels very Frankensteiny right now, but imagine a few years from now when these techniques are improved and expanded. We may reach a point where there is a virtually unlimited universe of concert-quality covers you can create with just a few taps. As a music lover, this is super intriguing, but on the other hand, I wonder how musicians will feel about it. And will their opinions change based on whether we can find a way to monetize it generously for them? I could see some artists rejecting this sort of thing outright because it&#8217;s not real music in the traditional sense, and I wouldn&#8217;t blame them. But what if you told them that every time their voice was mixed into another song, they made a royalty off of it? That might change some opinions.<\/p>\n<p>This is going to be a really fun space to watch closely over the next few years. Until then, I leave you with another great cover: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=KV2ixprDrK8&#038;t=33m25s\">Metallica&#8217;s Orion \u2014 by Rodrigo y Gabriela<\/a>. Incidentally, the header image for this page is from their Masonic Auditorium show in 2015. Pure luck but <a href=\"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/images\/inline\/IMG_3166-scaled.jpeg\">probably the best photo I&#8217;ve ever taken<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s nothing like a great cover. You&#8217;re rekindling angst at a Pearl Jam show and without any warning they go right into a Beatles song. You recognize some David Bowie lyrics on Spotify, and you discover it&#8217;s an unrecognizable version of Let&#8217;s Dance by M. Ward. You listen to Tiny Cities by Sun Kil Moon [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":29349,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[504,282,39],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","category-original","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29327","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29327"}],"version-history":[{"count":27,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29327\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29358,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29327\/revisions\/29358"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/29349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29327"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29327"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeindustries.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29327"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}