ABOUT THE TEAM

Rui Guo is a third year PhD-student from the music department of the University of Sussex. His research is to use AI to generate music. It is the first time he has used AI to write a song. Rui has played piano since he was 6 years old, but he is only a amature musician and has an educational background in computer science. This is also the first time he wrote a song for competition.

ABOUT THE SONG

Since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic, the author has been unable to go home. He is studying in the UK and his hometown is 5,000 miles away. He misses his family and hometown. In the spring he sees the cherry blossoms in the UK, and they are very similar to the ones at home. The scents, flowers and spring landscapes evoke many memories, and this song is about these memories and hope for the world.

ABOUT THE HUMAN-AI CO-CREATION PROCESS

First I wrote three lines of lyrics, and used this AI lyrics service to generate the rest of the lyrics for the song. The lyrics that were generated make me happy.

I proposed an AI system for music generation with multiple tracks, and I first chose some parameters including key E minor and some track features for the system. The system first generated a section of 16 bars, and I used the first generation as intro. Then the system kept on generating section of 8 bars and they concatenated with the previous 8 bars, and I choose some tune from the newly generated 8 bars. If the quality was good, I used them directly. But mostly I got inspiration from the new tune and adapt it as a new phrase. Phrase by phrase, the song is written with the help of AI, and more than 80% of the melody is inspired by the AI system.

The intro and bridge are totally generated by AI and no change was made. And there were two outro’s which I tied together. After I had the melody, I used the AI to add some bass and strings. The guidance of the first part is entirely generated by AI. Lastly, I added drums with a drum loop and equalization effect to the whole piece using Logic Pro.