AI Can Develop Lyrics For Music Tracks
August 10, 2021Artificial Intelligence or AI is finding its way into various sectors including the music industry. University of Waterloo researchers have developed an AI system that can analyse instrumental music tracks, then create lyrics that best fit the beat and genre. Its creators say it can also help artists find inspiration when writing their own songs.
The software is called Lyricjam, a real-time AI system developed by members of the University’s Natural Language Processing Lab. Led by Olga Vechtomova, an engineering professor at Waterloo, the team has been researching creative applications of AI for years. The initial work created a system that could learn musical expressions of artists and generate lyrics in their style.
Now, Lyricjam can identify chord progressions, tempo and instrumentation to create lyrics that suit the mood and emotions expressed by live music. This happens in real-time and musicians or bands can keep playing while the system continuously receive these raw audio clips, which are processed by the neural network to generate new lyric lines.
Watch the demonstration video here.
“The purpose of the system is not to write a song for the artist,” Vechtomova explains. “Instead, we want to help artists realize their own creativity. The system generates poetic lines with new metaphors and expressions, potentially leading the artists in creative directions that they haven’t explored before.”
Lyricjam is smart enough to tell the difference between the various genres including those for upbeat music. The lyrics that are generated are tailored to the respective music track. Apparently, musicians find it useful in helping them tweak their songs or structure chords differently for the best possible result. Since its launch in June, 2021 Lyricjam has been used by over 1,500 people worldwide.
The team’s research will be presented at the International Conference on Computations Creativity in September, and has been pre-published on arXiv. Those who are interested in trying out LyricJam can access it at https://lyricjam.ai.
