I'll Marry You, Punk Come

Originally from the US, Dadabots and Portrait XO joined forces at the Factory Berlin artist residency to compete in the Eurovision 2020 AI Song Contest. Rania Kim, aka Portrait XO, is a singer and multi-media artist. She is the founder of Sound Obsessed, an arts collective featuring musicians working with emerging tech. Dadabots is the music-hacker duo of CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski. They are widely known for their 24/7 death metal generator Relentless Doppelganger livestreaming on YouTube (it's still going!). Zack manages the machine learning team at Pex, an audio-video search engine. CJ has competed in 65+ hackathons which is way too many all-nighters drinking tea and coding. Together they share an absurd sense of humor, a love for underground music, and play no less than 5 instruments. They publish research on raw audio neural nets, but their main focus is collaborating with artists they admire.

"Lying dead on the floor.. No head rest assured" It didn’t exactly win the popular vote, but our runner-up submission to the 2020 Eurovision AI Song Competition was the judge’s favorite for best creative use of AI. We used 7 neural net models, including Wave-U-Net, SampleRNN, Coconet, MusicAutobot, and GPT2, to generate lyrics, midi, and audio. These elements were curated and combined in an Ableton session as part of a music production workflow. Story: Human girl and AI boy fall in love, while a ruthless virulent monster wrecks their lives. Pop heats into rave, mutates smoothly into death metal, surrenders, and lulls gently back to pop. Honestly, AI music production feels natural to us. Compared to the tedious bricklaying of sequencers, it is an adventurous hunt and gather. There is no less creativity. Producers can use their aesthetic taste to curate collages of machine dada and audio floatsam into works of art. We think these tools will just become part of normal music production.