A neural network project going by the name of Jukebox was used in an attempt to generate a song in the style of Joe Bonamassa, reports Music Radar. Described as “a neural net that generates music,” it was developed by a company called OpenAI. If you’ve been following the topic, you might have stumbled upon a few AIs that generate music in the style of a certain artist, band, or even an entire genre. What seems like a part of a very ambitious science-fiction novel is slowly becoming a part of our reality.
The paper, published at Cornell University, reads:
“We tackle the long context of raw audio using a multi-scale VQ-VAE to compress it to discrete codes, and modeling those using autoregressive Transformers. We show that the combined model at scale can generate high-fidelity and diverse songs with coherence up to multiple minutes. We can condition on artist and genre to steer the musical and vocal style, and on unaligned lyrics to make the singing more controllable.”
But not to get too obsessed with geeky developer details that (most of) us musicians won’t understand, OpenAI has also shared a few of the samples. These don’t sound perfect and you might get some low-fi vibes from them. This is, of course, due to some of the AI’s limitations.
However, the original music that the AI has generated sounds genuine. One of the artists used for generating this music was Joe Bonamassa.
The AI’s sample explorer has a total of 7116 songs to offer, which you can check out at this location. As far as the songs in the style of Joe Bonamassa go, there are 311 tracks in the library. For the most part, these were AI’s attempts to generate a song and they aren’t exactly listenable. The same goes for any artist. However, some tracks manage to replicate their respective genres and some are actually very enjoyable.
OpenAI shared some of their Jukebox Joe Bonamassa favorites which you can check out in embedded players below:
Among numerous artists, we can also find the Eagles and a song that turns from a piece heavily inspired by “Hotel California” and into a full-on heavy metal banger.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons, Tara Winstead via Pexels.com
