The development of artificial intelligence (AI) methods like machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) has created new opportunities and tools for many industries such as self-driving cars, voice recognition and image classification. But can this new and improved AI be used to create popular electronic music? And how?

 

This project explores the possibilities of using AI to make Electronic Dance Music (EDM). Artificial Dance Music (ADM) is music created by AI and in particular, by DL, which trains on EDM music to learn from it and then recreate a symbolic representation. In this study, a Turing test is used to evaluate the generated music, with participants listening to both algorithmically-generated music and the original samples. A statistical evaluation of the Turing test results proves that there is no significant difference that distinguishes machine and human generated EDM music. The goal is to investigate to what extent a machine can create original music and if it can be used as a music-producing tool in the future.

 

The research focuses on the possibilities of using computer creativity, what this means and how to evaluate it. Similar approaches have been explored before but mostly in other genres such as jazz, classical, and contemporary music. A reason for this is that a genre like classical baroque music contains large collections of pieces written by the same composer, which makes it ideal for AI research. The hypothesis of this thesis is that an AI model can successfully create music from a small collection of songs if specific aspects are considered in the system implementation. The key contribution of this thesis is the method of using AI to create popular music, which offers a unique approach in the field of Algorithmic Music research.

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In Autumn 2021, the methods the ADM project was used to create AI music on behalf of the research council in Norway. The task was to create AI music based on the music from a Norwegian pop artist ARY which was featured in a documentary. Similar methods where used to create the music as the Deadmau5 approach, but in this context, lyrics was also generated by using a transfer learning approach on the GPT2 model. 

The Mini-documentary can be seen here. 

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