The cover of the band "VoiceOver" is a single featuring paintings from Xiaoice.
AI musicians within the framework of the Xiaoice
Your musical inspiration needs artificial intelligence to provide? This is not the first time Xiaoice have "infiltrated" the human world.
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In late September, in Beijing, a bar called Dream was hosting a concert to listen to a new album. However, one of the most important creators, Xiaoice absent and can only meet everyone on the screen. And in a short period of time, we may not "see" Xiaoice, after all, she only exists in the two-dimensional world.
Artificial Intelligence Xiaoice cooperated with human bands and recently released its debut album "Dive into the Virtual World", which has been launched on major music platforms.
This is not the first time Xiaoice have "infiltrated" the human world. In June this year, Hua Zhibing enrolled in the Department of Computer Science of Tsinghua University, she has poetry, composition, painting and other skills; a year ago, Xiaoice graduated from the Music Engineering Department of Shanghai Conservatory of Music, majoring in music creation; two years ago, Xia Yubing graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and held a solo exhibition; earlier, in 2017, Xiaoice published the poetry collection "The Sun Lost the Glass Window"...
Xiaoice've been growing, in the words of their AI community, iterative. If before Xiaoice was just learning human skills, this time, she seemed to want to work with humans on an equal footing.
Artificial intelligence provides inspiration for human creators
In this album, 10 "AI musicians" Xiaoice framework have collaborated with 11 human bands for half a year, including songwriting, song interpretation, visual creation, etc. In other words, they write lyrics, compose music, sing together, and even design album covers together.
Flipping through Xiaoice's past resume, you will find that these creations can actually be completed independently, so why bring humans to play with this time? Xiaoice said she wanted to provide "inspiration" to human artists. Yes, inspiration, how many things that humans can't find, artificial intelligence actually said to give?
Xu Yuanchun, chief operating officer of Xiaoice and head of the Artificial Intelligence Creativity Lab, said that over the years, in the process of collaborative creation with human artists, we have found that one of the links that human creators especially need is motivation - creative motivation. Especially in music creation, the creator needs to listen constantly, and may have to ask a number of very good bands or musicians to keep creating, until a melody hits him, let him catch a motivation, and then he creates.
Over the course of this collaboration, Xiaoice will continue to provide various motivations, and humans will only have to wait for the so-called "inspiration" to suddenly appear. "Without the blessing of artificial intelligence technology, this kind of rapid and large-scale generation is difficult to do." Xu Yuanchun said.
Xiaoice is no longer "one person", but has a "Xiaoice framework", a "group of AI", including 18-year-old girls Xiaoice, and AI He Chang and other 9 others. They have different timbres, different musical styles, and technology makes the diversity of artificial intelligence a reality.
"For example, in the music industry, Faye Wong is one of the most important representatives, but she cannot represent the entire music industry. If we have the technical ability to do the basic framework, this framework can support the entire music industry, is it just to be One Faye Wong, or to do the whole music industry? Xiaoice framework choose to do the latter. He Xing, technical director of the WaveLand team at Xiaoice company, said.
In this way, the Xiaoice paired with the human band one by one, inspired by the creative text and visual reference given by the band, Xiaoice carried out continuous and rich songwriting to inspire the band; the band enriched some of the lyrics into complete singles and sang with the Xiaoice. Xiaoice also created several paintings that have been used for single cover production.
Humans are responsible for technology, and artificial intelligence is responsible for emotions
At the scene of the song listening meeting, Chen Hongyu of the "Voiceover" band read two lyrics to remind the audience that one was written by Xiaoice and the other was written by human musicians, and most of the people present guessed wrong. Music critic Zhang Di said: "Xiaoice words and phrases are even more 'poetic' and 'aesthetic', and the slightly 'staggered' way of using words may arouse a kind of romance that people yearn for." ”
The band "Rain Kun" co-created "Garden Eden" with Xiaoice. Band member Yu Kun said: "God created the original AI in the Garden of Eden, human beings, and it is interesting for Xiaoice to create from this perspective. I extracted some of the content from the lyrics that Xiaoice gave me, and 90% of the text was given by Xiaoice, and the other 10% was just a extraction and reorganization of all the words she gave with a purpose. ”
Amos, a member of the band "Bad Sweetheart," admits that as human beings, it is difficult to create such a large and detailed motivation in such a short period of time. Xiaoice inspired him more directly in the text, those slightly mechanical sentences, sometimes similar to literary translations. For example, "the courtyard riding on the sun", "the pain of people who talk about happiness"... And "I will grow several symbols of life / Tonight the sky is like her beauty", even reminds him of the poet Haizi.
Xiaoice's addition was especially significant for the band "Lord Earth", and they finally had a lead singer! Band member He Shazhan introduced that the collaborative work "Mr. Tu's Journey to The Green Record", Mr. Tu represents turing, the father of the computer, and the Walking Green Book is a particularly beautiful text of the Xiaoice, giving a relaxed and happy outing mood.
The most daring attempt of this song is to invite AI singer He Chang to be the lead singer. Although we are human beings, we are better at arranging, mixing, and playing these more technical tasks; Xiaoice as an AI, is responsible for the lyrics and singing of these parts of the work that require emotional and emotional aesthetics. He Shazhan said, "With the advancement of science and technology, the future of music must be more and more exquisite, I fully believe that AI can be comparable to human creation." But from a meaningful point of view, whether the music created by AI can have the temperature of human works, I will still believe it. ”
Spice and Xiaoice collaborated on "Dreaming, Touching, Repeating, Ache," a song based on Xiaoice's No. 15 song "Slightly Polished." Band member Chen Chen Chen said, "I am the one who embraces the future, will artificial intelligence replace artists or musicians?" Will creators lose their jobs? I don't care, I want them to get better and better, more and more powerful. Then it allowed me to go from being a creator and willingly returning to a happy audience. ”
Not to replace humanity, but to help humanity do something more remarkable
This isn't the first time Xiaoice has helped human artists: in Japan, Xiaoice co-created red and white singers with AVEX Records; domestically, Xiaoice has been invited to compose a new hip-hop theme song for a brand and perform it with human singers.
Xiaoice has the ability to complete songs independently, as early as 2018, the theme song of Shandong Satellite TV's Spring Festival Gala, "Happy Departure", was composed and sung by Xiaoice. Previously, poetry collections, art exhibitions, songs, songs, and Xiaoice were also independent creators, but this time the emphasis was on cooperation.
In the Dream Bar, AI engineers, Xiaoice, and onlookers all have different dreams.
Xu Yuanchun said that Xiaoice team believes that the purpose of artificial intelligence is not to replace humans, nor to defeat her previous technology, but to help humans do more remarkable things. This includes not only completing tasks for people and increasing productivity, but also helping people to further unleash their creativity.
"We are not trying to put Xiaoice on the road of art, but to 'move up' to the content field and open up the future of the highly customized content industry." Xu Yuanchun said. Taking the music industry as an example, it is possible to produce and supply content with stable quality and extremely low cost without human participation, and there is a lot of landing space in the future in the video, film and television soundtrack and other industries. At present, Xiaoice has reached a cooperation with China Unicom Wo Music to provide 100% customized music content services for hundreds of millions of users.
Music critic Yang Fan believes that there is no need to measure AI music by the traditional standard of human music, and at the moment of the birth of Xiaoice, new standards have been created. "Whether AI music is good or not is not based on the criterion that she doesn't look like human music. If measured by humanity's existing aesthetic, AI music can never be better. "In the future, we may be able to produce a separate musical category, parallel to the existing human music, and self-contained." ”
Xiaoice and humanity wrote two lyrics separately: one is "There is a twilight sun in the house / Drifting into the shadow of the moon / Strange film drifting in / You gently pick it up"; the other is "It is a fragment of a cloud / Philosophy records your and my story / You merge it into the body / To achieve each other's eternity".
Which paragraph is Xiaoice, can you guess correctly?
Jiang Xiaobin, a reporter of China Youth Daily and China Youth Network
Source: China Youth Daily