ABOUT THE TEAM

Nobel Yoo is a software engineer and musician living in Oakland, California who’s been developing musical software for the last 4 years. Besides generative music composition software, he’s also created a medley of tools for performing live as well as a number of audiovisual installations that allow anyone to play music, regardless of their training or background.

ABOUT THE SONG

This song is the first song that’s mostly been written by my automated composition software. I recently had a significant breakthrough and it allowed me to write this song in something like 4 hours. To me, it represents a massive broadening of possibilities for me as an artist as this tool compounds the rate and the manner with which I can explore creative ideas. The tool itself has a wide variety of personalizable inputs that allow me to explore ideas in almost any direction I want and it’s already outperformed the rate at which I can come up with musical ideas on my own. This technological success and the possibilities it enables are the core of what this song means to me.

ABOUT THE HUMAN-AI CO-CREATION PROCESS

This song was largely created through a Max MSP patch that I’ve developed for speeding up my songwriting process. This Max MSP patch can then be loaded up in Ableton Live, where it generates the song. I’ve created a custom Ableton Live project for use with this Max MSP patch that specifies various parameters of the musical generation, such as instruments, effect chain routing, drum inputs, melodic inputs, and chord inputs.

Using this tool involves two major steps. The first is personalization. Both the Max MSP patch and the Ableton Live project have many parameters that can and should be tweaked for each individual artist. These parameters include defining instrument range, rhythmic blocks for recombination, defining bounds on what components can and can’t be combined, etc. This is a fairly long term process that took me something like a month.

However, once you have tweaked the parameters of generation just the way you like it, the inputs you need to provide to generate a new song are fairly minimal. The only two inputs needed are a list of chord progressions and a list of melodies. After that, the Max MSP patch will generate anywhere from 2 to 20 minute song using the provided chord progressions and melodies. Since the song is generated in Ableton, it’s immediately ready for you to tweak to your liking.

For my submission, after generation, I restructured the song and touched up the mix of various tracks, and wrote 3 more, fairly minimal parts.