Participants 2025
About the TEAM
Team Off StAIge consists of students from The University of Hong Kong who, despite majoring in diverse fields, are united by a shared passion for AI and music. As they delve into AI as a creative tool, they investigate how integrating AI with traditional music can help preserve and promote these invaluable cultural relics, which embody intelligence, authenticity, and aesthetic beauty.
Each team member has a Chinese ancestral background and a deep connection to Chinese culture. Some have unique ties to traditional Chinese music, such as Chinese opera and classical instruments. For example, one teammate has family connections to Chinese opera artists.
With a commitment to preserving tradition, the team seeks innovative ways to reimagine Chinese music in contemporary forms. After extensive research into how traditional music has been transformed into pop genres—such as the "China Wind"—they aim to demonstrate that Chinese traditional music can be revitalized in new formats through AI.
About the SONG
The song, titled 《白𬞟洲》 (White Clover Isle), is a reimagining Chinese traditional music with AI. Our project, themed "When Traditional Meets AI," seeks to revitalize Chinese traditional music by blending it with modern AI techniques. Utilizing AI tools like YuE for melody generation and DeepSeek for lyric creation, we crafted a piece that maintains the essence of Chinese traditional music while adopting a popular verse-chorus structure for broader appeal. This approach not only preserves cultural heritage but also makes it accessible to contemporary audiences. Our collaborative process highlighted the synergy between human creativity and AI, allowing us to refine the song's emotional depth and narrative. Through this work, we aim to bridge the gap between tradition and innovation, ensuring that these musical treasures resonate with future generations.
About the HUMAN-AI PROCESS
We harnessed YuE’s melody generation to align harmonies with emotional arcs, hoping our story and aesthetics will more easily connect with listeners. Its audio synthesis, crafting full songs lasting several minutes, enriched our sonic textures, though batch generation demanded hefty GPU memory (24GB for two sessions, 80GB for four or more), forcing us to scale back at times. Parameter tuning was time-intensive, so we prioritized human refinement to keep our product from being too far off from our intentions and schedules.
To reach our final version of lyrics, we also explored the creative capabilities of ChatGPT. We also asked the platform to create lyrics in the style of classical Beijing Opera, using Mei Lanfang's past works as reference, to match the Melody we created with YuE. To match the melody, we gradually simplified and adjusted the lyrics through multiple AI generators, adding Verse, Chorus, Bridge and Outro in turn. For our final version we chose the one given by Chatgpt: <白𬞟洲>, which corresponds to the English name of <White Clover Isle>. This version of lyrics could satisfy our artistic vision of reimagining the style of Beijing Opera and Mei LanFang. To better raise the popularity of traditional music and circulate the song, we chose to use the verse-chorus structure from popular music for the reimagination.