Since last March 24, an Artificial Intelligence called Dadabots has been generating and broadcasting death metal music live 24 hours a day from YouTube. Created by musician-technologists CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, this is one of many death metal algorithms developed by the pair over the past few years.
How is it possible that an artificial intelligence can create live music?
The learning technique used by Dadabots focuses on the entire discography of a single, given artist. Each of the discs is divided into thousands of small “samples” or sound portions. From here, the algorithm creates thousands of iterations to develop the AI, which begins to generate white noise until it eventually learns to produce more recognizable musical elements.
This version of Dadabots has been created from the death metal band Archspire, although the developers have already worked with their neural network on previous occasions based on other groups such as Room For A Ghost, Meshuggah and Krallice. What's more, Carr and Zukowski themselves have even released entire albums composed by these algorithms, totally free on their Dadabots' Bandcamp. Although certainly, this uninterrupted death metal broadcast on YouTube is something completely new.
The creators of this artificial intelligence explain that the majority of generated music experiments are usually carried out by analyzing classical or pop music artists, leaving aside other more minority genres such as black metal. In the words of the developers, their goal was always for the AI to address “a realistic recreation” of the artist to be imitated, achieving an unexpected “perfectly imperfect” result.
Curiously, all this can lead to consequences of a certain grayish hue when it comes to copyright. The fact that an artificial intelligence learns from the patterns and sounds of an already existing “flesh and blood” artist can border on legality, and it is certainly something that we still have no precedent for today.
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