THE conventional wisdom is that the COVID-19 restrictions are bringing out a lot of human creativity, but a team of music producers, data scientists, musicians, artists, and developers is creating a Eurovision-like hit with the help of artificial intelligence. 

The “AI ??Song Contest” has been organised by Dutch public broadcaster VPRO, which asks all entrants to provide details about their creative systems and processes, and yes, Australia has a team competing.

The Australian group, together known as “Team Uncanny Valley”, is made up of Dr Oliver Bown, who specialises in creative applications of artificial intelligence at UNSW Art & Design; and head of music and innovation at Uncanny Valley, Charlton Hill, co-producer of “Sleek Geeks” for ABC TV Caroline Pegram, music producer of songs for artists like Sia and Darren Hayes, Justin Shave, computer scientist from RMIT University, Dr Alexandra, L Uitdenbogerd, data scientist from UNSW Engineering, Dr Brendan Wright and CEO of Cicada Innovations, Sally-Ann Williams.

But, they stress, it wasn’t humans who wrote the song, but rather an artificial intelligence algorithm trained on past Eurovision songs to create the melody and the lyrics of their entry, “Beautiful the World”.

Using a neural network and training it on audio samples of Australian animals, including koalas, kookaburras and the Tassie devil, to give it an authentic Australian character and acknowledging the bushfires that devastated the country earlier this year, taking the lives of many native animals.

“It can be a problem in this field for people to just say “listen to this great music made by machine” and to let the music alone speak for the quality of the computational system that’s been used,” says Dr Bown.

“But you never really know what you’re hearing until you’re able to examine the system and see what it actually does.”

Pegram, producer and strategist with Team Uncanny Valley, prefers to see it as a “co-creative approach”, which pairs humans with algorithms.

“We like to collaborate and rage with the machines,” she says.

According to Bown, “Beautiful the World” came out of an Uncanny Valley project with Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney, which uses machine learning to advance music innovation.

The team had both a producer and real vocalists, using a system designed to predict what the next note should be in a musical sequence, given one or more preceding notes.

“It’s exactly the same concept as trying to predict the closing value of the stock market tomorrow based on the previous week’s values,” Bown explains,

“If you train the predictive model on Bach’s music, it will be more Bach-sounding. But it’s nothing like building a model of Bach’s creative process. In fact, it can be quite anti-creative because it is trying to do the most ‘expected’ thing it can.”

Wright says, “This is certainly an exciting time to play in the field of generative audio, exploring the potential of new tools and ideas developed during this renaissance in artificial intelligence research, enabling a level of creativity that would have been unimaginable even five years ago.”

Above all, the song had to be fun, an intrinsic aspect of the Eurovision Song Contest which has inspired the new AI Song Contest, says Hill, “but it’s also in the team’s DNA. It had to be the kind of song you could play on your guitar around a campfire”.

To listen and vote, visit vprobroadcast.com/titles/ai-songcontest/teams/Australia. The winner in the will be announced on May 12.