Panel session
Sounding Difference:
Music AI across Cultures
DATE: July 6, 2021
TIME: 15.00 - 15.40 CEST
HOSTS: Rujing “Stacy” Huang and Lamtharn “Hanoi” Hantrakul
PANEL: Teams from AI Song Contest 2021: STHLM, Diwas ft. CHEPANG, Kutumba, and Hari Maharjan Project, Menara, Gonimix y Andino and H:Ai:N.
REGISTER: This session is part of the 4-day Music & Innovation Summit by Wallifornia MusicTech. You can register for the whole event here, and attend all sessions for free.
ABSTRACT: Much more than a program, a mold, and an abstract algorithm, technologies are culturally and historically situated artifacts. Cultural traditions, on the other hand, are continuously renegotiated and redefined to include emerging technological devices and practices. Featuring four AI Song Contest 2021 participating teams, this panel explores such intersections of creative technology (music AI) and traditional cultural heritages that span geographical boundaries.
Read more about the host and panelists below.
Hosts
Rujing “Stacy” Huang
Rujing “Stacy” Huang, scholar, singer-songwriter, and composer, completed her PhD (2019) in Ethnomusicology from Harvard University, where her work crossed boundaries between musicology, music theory and sound studies, as well as early Chinese history and philosophy. In 2020, she joined KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm) as a postdoctoral researcher on “Music Cultures & Artificial Intelligence”.
Lamtharn “Hanoi” Hantrakul
Lamtharn “Hanoi” Hantrakul is a Bangkok-born Shanghai-based Cultural Technologist, Research Scientist and Composer. As an AI researcher, Hanoi focuses on audio ML that is inclusive of musical traditions from around the world. At Google AI, he co-authored the breakthrough Differentiable Digital Signal Processing (DDSP) library with the Magenta team and led its deployment across two Google projects: Tone Transfer and Sounds of India. At TikTok, he continues to develop AI tools that empower music making across borders and skill levels. As a Cultural Technologist, he has won international acclaim for his cross-cultural fiddle “Fidular” (Core77, A'), which has been displayed in museums and exhibitions in the US, EU and Asia.
Panelists
The panelists of this session are members from four teams that participate in the AI Song Contest 2021.
Team H:Ai:N
The song HAN:한 was produced under the theme of Korean sentiment ‘Han’ which is a unique Korean emotion that is intertwined with the trials and sorrows during Korean history, such as the pain of division. The song has a multi-persona concept to tell the story of pain, and sadness of the two egos, generated by splitting one into two.
Read more and listen to their AI Song Contest entry here.
CHEPANG has released two albums expressing extreme grindcore music. Their work and thinking is progressively growing towards doing new things, always moving forward. This project started out by training on their latest album CHATTA and later evolved into exploring SampleRNN with varying music from Nepal.
Read more and listen to their AI Song Contest entry here.
Team STHLM
Team STHLM three amateur musicians based in Stockholm, Sweden. Bob teaches machine learning at the technical university (KTH), and sometimes plays Ai-generated folk music on his accordion during lectures. Daniel is a daytime accountant and nighttime flute player, dreamer and music instruments enthusiast. Lisa sells machine learning solutions for risk analyses, but in the spare time explores different kinds of singing, from sacred music to metal.
Read more and listen to their AI Song Contest entry here.
Spanish team formed by Paula Colmenares León, Gonzalo Nieto Montero and Fernando López Gavilánez respectively, with the additional collaboration of Juan Fernández-Savater Muñoz, as guitarist and guitar arranger. Their entry, Coco, duérmete ya is an adult Spanish lullaby.
Read more and listen to their AI Song Contest entry here.