As it turns out, an artificially intelligent (AI) neural network can work very nicely. Not all black metals are composed of disgruntled teenagers on a frustrated Norwegian night.
CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, two music-loving machine learning engineers, are the brains behind DADABOTS, a “band” that uses artificial intelligence tools to mimic the sounds of black metal, death metal, and many other genres.
For their latest project, called “Relentless Doppelganger”, the two have created a live stream that plays endless symphony for 24 days of AI-produced Death Metal. DADABOTS has produced several albums since its inception in 2012, completely bridging the genre from skate punk to black metal.
In their words, the project is a step towards “eliminating people from the black metal”
“Most style-specific genre music experiments typically explore artists in similar textbooks like the Beatles, Bach, and Beethoven, but very few people looked to encourage modern genre outliers like black metal,” a previous paper from them read from 2017.
Artificial neural networks are inspired by the processing of information in the human brain, but instead of brain cells, the system uses thousands or even millions of artificial neurons or nodes. Simply put, the network consists of input and output levels, As well as “a hidden layer” that converts the input into something that can use the output layer is basically “thinking”. In the case of this 24/7 AI-produced metal, the input is the music of the Canadian metal band Arc spire. The neural network is basically trying to mimic the sound of this music that you can hear in the output.
Single vocalists became a composer of ghostly voices, rock bands became crunchy cubist-jazz, and cross-breed of multiple recordings became surrealistic chimeras. When we set out for a real entertainment of the original information, we rejoiced at the aesthetic quality of its imperfections.
As you can hear in the video, it’s surprising to the point. Although the music sometimes feels a bit messy and annoying, it works effectively in capturing the mood and sound of metallic music. This is especially impressive when you realize that this live stream is just a work of AI, Warts, and everything, there is absolutely no creation from its creators. You can check out more from DADABOTS on their website.
