Participants 2025
About the TEAM
Our team brings together four students and two professors from the Frost School of Music at the University of Miami, USA. The students represent two innovative programs – Music Engineering and Modern Artist Development & Entrepreneurship – while the professors contribute expertise in music technology, creativity, and AI.
Our team name plays on the auditory nerve: the structure that carries signals from the inner ear into the brain’s auditory pathway. Just as the auditory nerve transmits sound with precision and resilience, our name also reflects the “nerve” it takes to present bold new creations in the sonic domain.
We are currently engaged in a university-funded project called CHAI (Concerts with Humans and Artificial Intelligence), which explores the societal impact of AI in music. This work has inspired us to take on the AI Song Contest as an opportunity to push creative boundaries, experiment with human-AI collaboration, and share our ideas with the wider international community.
About the SONG
“Silent N[AI]ght” explores the idea of tyranny and the peace and calm that ideally comes with its passing. Musically, we wanted to depart from typical verse-chorus song forms, and the progressive metal genre provides a great vehicle for this exploration. In most theme-and-variation works, the melody appears first and becomes increasingly elaborate. Here, we reverse that arc: our through-composed song is organized the other way around, with indecipherable variations at the beginning, decipherable variations midway through, and the theme revealed at the end. The lyrical and vocal progression mirrors this musical journey, from harsh expressions of resistance to calm, resonant voices of peace. Through thematic variations of the universally known song “Silent Night,” we aim to highlight both historical and ongoing tyrannical issues around the world, focusing on the theme of peace rather than its religious origins.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
The creative process behind our song began with an AI model called VarGen co-developed by Tom in 2024, designed to generate theme-and-variation material. Our initial idea was to have the piece begin in chaos with distorted AI-generated variations and slowly resolve into the better-known melody of “Silent Night.” To create this, we inferred from a version of the model trained on 185 metal guitar parts. Mike, Jacey, and Tom fed it the melody of “Silent Night” and used its output of 20 variations, some of which were unconventional, as the basis for various musical ideas. However, we ultimately decided the chaotic section worked better as an outro, flipping our original concept.
We then wrote the rest of the song by shaping individual sections around either the AI-generated melodic or rhythmic content. Lyrics were written by Raina, Mike, and Jacey asking ChatGPT to create two different poems about tyrannical resistance – one with each word beginning with the letters that spell "SILENT NIGHT," and another using scrambled letters from the first verse of "Silent Night."
Raina recorded these lyrics on clean vocals and another collaborator, Brayton, recorded improvised screamed vocals to match the emotional shifts throughout the track. Mike and Jacey recorded all of the electric guitar and bass parts alongside Asher on drums. The final production occurred in Pro Tools by Mike and Jacey, where they fine-tuned rhythms, layered synths, and shaped the final mix with the help of iZotope's AI, “Ozone,” for mastering assistance.
Lyrics
*S*trength
*I*nspires
*L*iberty
*E*nding
*N*ight
*T*ruth
*N*urtures
*I*ndependence
*G*iving
*H*ope
*T*o
All
Silent men lie,
yet lively hearts feel.
They send pain,
still, I lend fire.
Not one shall hold
this free land.
Even in chains,
my mind sails on.
Tyrants fell
not by iron –
but by the will.