SOUND OBSESSED
AI Song Contest 2021 / participantsTEAM / SOUND OBSESSED
SONG / VESSEL
TEAM MEMBERS / Portrait XO and Rezar.
LISTEN AND EVALUATE VESSEL
The lines are now closed. You can no longer vote. Watch the Award Ceremony on July 6 to find out which song wins the AI Song Contest 2021!
LYRICS AND MORE ABOUT THIS ENTRY BELOW
ABOUT THE TEAM
Portrait XO is an artist who creates musical and visual works with traditional and non-traditional methods. She researches computational creativity, human-machine collaboration, and explores new formats & applications for forward-thinking art and sound. After completing her artist residency at Factory Berlin x Sonar+D in 2020, she continues to evolve with art, music, science, and technology. She’s been invited as a speaker/performer at SXSW, Ars Electronica, Reeperbahn Festival + other events. Ramon Riezouw is a music producer and songwriter based in Berlin, better known for his voice in electronic pop group NIHILS and solo project Rezar. Having spent numerous years in bands, touring Europe, playing SXSW, Ramon has honed his craft as a songwriter, producer and vocalist. With growing curiosity towards the human voice and the applications of AI, a collaborative effort formed in Spring 2021 with Portrait XO to explore and play with AI-generated vocals in new and unpredictable ways.
ABOUT THE SONG
The story around this song is about hunting for inspiration from new sounds and surrendering in the form of a self-resynthesizing vessel to allow the unpredictable nature of AI inspire new creative ideas while questioning the difference between a human serving as a vessel vs machines. It’s about the search for new inspiration, and seeking a balance between freedom, control, and letting go in the creative process between human and machine while learning something new about our own voices and creativity. As this is a very new collaboration and we created this song in 1 session, we were both left feeling in awe and excited about how quickly we both felt inspired to write such a track like this. We’re really excited about the new songs we’ll create next. We will be performing this song at an upcoming science festival - EFFEKTE 2021 in Karlsruhe for the first time.
ABOUT THE HUMAN-AI CO-CREATION PROCESS
We used open to public Google Colab Notebooks (with help from friends to help debug them because some of them were a bit buggy) and Birds on Mars custom speech synthesis model that allows text to speech and make the voice sing, ramble, speak a new language, change speed, and pitch (created based on 1 hour of Portrait XO’s talking voice). We really loved experimenting with both our vocals as we were on a hunt for interesting sounds from the human voice, and wanted to find out how our voices could morph into each other. We were happy with the interesting textures that came from making our voices sound like each other. We ended up spending quite a lot of time training our voices on these models, picking the best sounds, and creating something we really liked.
LYRICS
Hide and seeking
Race for gold
Rise and fleeting
Grounds are shaken
Don’t you know
Lose control
(Lose control)
Lose control
(Lose control)
The flowers of the lotus contain a seed vessel shaped like an inverted cone or bell, which are very holy symbols with all peoples, and representative male and female.
Hide and seeking
Race for gold
Sparking creation
Rise and fleeting
Grounds are shaken
Don’t you know
Lose control
(Lose control)
Got hesitation
Lose control
(Lose control)
Sparking creation
Creation
Control
Creation
Control
Lose Control