AI Song Contest: Human-AI Co-Creation in Songwriting
What are the challenges in using AI as a tool in songwriting? What are the design implications?
Cheng-Zhi Anna Huang Hendrik Vincent Koops Ed Newton-Rex Monica Dinculescu Carrie J. Cai
Remember the AI Song Contest from 2020? The contest hosted by VPRO was Eurovision with a twist, where teams had to use AI for some aspect of their song entry. This expanded the focus to be not only on the final song, but also on teams’ collaboration process with AI behind the scenes. Thirteen teams from eight different countries competed, bringing together 61 musicians, developers, and scientists. As judges on the AI Panel, we came up with survey questions to guide teams in documenting how they incoporated AI into their songwriting process. We then carried out a qualitative analysis to better understand what musicians and developers needed when co-creating a song with AI, the fundamental challenges they faced, and the creative strategies they came up with to overcome some of these challenges. Check out the full article here on the Google Tensorflow Magenta Blog: https://magenta.tensorflow.org/aisongcontest
Image taken from Huang, C.A., Koops, H.V., Newton-Rex, E., Dinculescu, M., Cai, C. (2020). Human-AI Co-Creation in Songwriting. Accepted for publication in Proceedings of the 19th International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference.
