What Drake and The Weeknd’s song tells us about the future of music created with artificial intelligence

What Drake and The Weeknd's song tells us about the future of music created with artificial intelligence

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For those who appreciate the genre, Heart on My Sleeve it’s not a bad song: a nice beat, an insistent harmonic turn, a refrain with two alternating voices. They are those of Drake and The Weeknd, but they never wrote this song, they never sang it. And in fact it bears the signature of Ghostwriter977, nomen omen, who composed it using an artificial intelligence.

Millions listened to it, including on Spotify and other music streaming platforms, then Universal, which owns the rights to the two musicians, blocked the track where it could. However, it can still be found online: there is the original song, dozens of remixes, longer versions with a cleaner sound. Indeed, one of Ghostwriter977’s tricks was to propose Heart on My Sleeve like a demo: only two minutes, not perfect audio, some inconsistencies in the mix. Another was to invent (again with the help of AI) a text that made sense for both: and so the song talks about Selena Gomez, also a singer, who was first engaged to one, then to the other. ‘other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Po2BHFHtKgQ

How did he do

We don’t know exactly what tools Ghostwriter977 used, but it doesn’t matter: the platforms capable of creating text, images, code, but also audio and video are more numerous every day. The best-known example of creative AI is ChatGPT, which answers questions like a human would. It does so by statistically evaluating which sequences of words are most used, therefore without understanding, but the result is no less surprising for this. Ghostwriter977 used notes, sounds, rhythms, as well as words. For the voices, it’s likely that it’s actually a human being singing, and that his voice was then altered to become that of Drake and The Weeknd. Artificial intelligence can make anyone say anything, starting from an audio file of just 3 minutes, but singing a song is another matter, even if apocryphal versions of Rihanna have been circulating for some months (Cuff It by Beyoncé) and Kanye West (the acoustic ballad Hey There, Delilah). David Guetta then used uberduck.ai technology to imitate Eminem’s voice and add it to one of his instrumental pieces: “I’m sure the future of music is in artificial intelligence, but nothing will replace taste,” he said. the French deejay told the BBC.

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The mathematics of music

The music is partly inspiration and partly mathematical: in the end, the distance between Baroque polyphony, a fugue by Bach and a score by Philip Glass is not as stellar as it seems, because they all respond to a precise formal structure. Which is often even more important than the melody or the rhythm, and which in the case of certain works by Brian Eno actually becomes the sole raison d’être of the piece, for example when the English musician alters the times and tones of the Canon by Pachelbel on Discreet Music: it’s 1975 and so the ambient was born. More recently, Eno has insisted on the concept of generative music: starting from a certain number of musical cells and a set of instructions, the end result is a combination of sounds that unfolds in a way not even the composer could predict, if only may still be called that. The concept reaches its purest expression with Reflection (2016), where the real work is not the disc, with its 54 minutes, but the app for iPhone, iPad and Apple TV, which generates ever-changing music and images, without time limits.

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The AI ​​revolution

So far, it is always the artist who establishes the rules, but when we move into the field of generative artificial intelligence, everything changes: the rules, in fact, are derived from the examples with which the system is trained. It’s not important to know the notes, know how to program a synth, play or sing, you don’t need an expert at the mixer or a sound engineer. Artificial intelligence breaks down reality into bits and builds another with the bits. Whether it’s the next Beatles song or the end of Beethoven’s 10th Symphony, just ask as accurately as possible. Sony has been working on it for years in its Parisian research laboratory, but today Google is ahead, so much so that MusicLM can even translate the description of a painting into music. So why not a movie scene?

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Removal

Heart on My Sleeve it’s not a cover, it’s not a mashup of those who populate TikTok and who have made music history, from Kylie Minogue with New Order to Britney Spears with Dua Lipa. For Universal it is just a fake, an example of deep fake, which “denies musicians the right compensation”. More: “Training artificial intelligence to use the music of our artists is a violation of copyright law”, as stated reads in a statement sent by the record company to the American magazine Billboard, because already today it would be possible to create unreleased songs by Michael Jackson (whose rights are in the hands of Sony), David Bowie (Warner) and many others, by training an artificial intelligence with their songs. And therefore, by extension, the copyright would still belong to Sony or Warner. Universal may have already asserted this principle when requesting the removal of the song, since technically Heart on My Sleeve it’s not part of his catalog, but all the other songs by The Weeknd and Drake are. The matter could be even simpler: it seems that the song contains an unauthorized sample of Metro Boomin: “We removed the video after receiving a valid copyright notice for a sample included in the video,” a spokesperson for The Verge explains. YouTube. “Whether or not the video was artificially generated does not affect our legal responsibility to provide a pathway for rights holders to remove content that allegedly infringes their copyrighted works.”

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Copyright

Heart on My Sleeve for Universal it is an example of deep fake, a fake that “denies musicians the right compensation”. More: “Training artificial intelligence to use the music of our artists is a violation of copyright law”. Agreed Enzo Mazza, president of the Federation of the Italian Music Industry: “The use of copyrighted works requires the authorization of the owner, and the voices and likenesses of artists and athletes must be used only with their consent”. It is one of the principles of Human Artistry CampAIgn, signed at the last SXSW in Austin, last month, by the most important associations of the world music sector, including Fimi: “Copyright protection exists to encourage and reward human creativity, skill, work and judgement, not the output created and generated only by machines.” A revolution that has just begun, as observed by Ghostwriter977 himself.

“Artificial intelligence will perhaps be able to write good songs, but not great songs” Nick Cave said a few months ago, replying to a fan. Recently, prompted on ChatGPT’s ability to write texts, he was even more direct: “she IS bullshit, a grotesque mockery of what it means to be human.” Judging by the comments to Heart on My Sleeve not everyone agrees: what is certain is that the advent of creative artificial intelligence is also an opportunity to rethink the role that music and art have in our lives.

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