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OpenAI launches Jukebox, an AI engine that creates entire songs

OpenAI launches Jukebox, an AI engine that creates entire songs

May 02, 2020
06:10 pm

What's the story

After writing news stories, beating professionals at poker, and detecting asteroids capable of hitting our planet, artificial intelligence is stepping into the world of music creation. OpenAI, the artificial intelligence research lab founded by Elon Musk and other tech moguls, has launched Jukebox, an open-source neural network that can generate entire songs on its own. Here's all about it.

AI

Jukebox generates songs with music, lyrics, and vocals

Trained on datasets containing music of almost every genre, Jukebox works as an automated system capable of creating novel songs, complete with recognizable lyrics, vocals, and music. According to OpenAI, it "can produce songs from highly diverse genres of music like rock, hip-hop, and jazz" and "capture melody, rhythm, long-range composition, and timbres for a wide variety of instruments".

Caveat

But, its creations sound a little familiar

While it is pretty impressive to see an AI create songs from scratch, it is worth noting that, in many cases, its creations might sound familiar. The reason being, in many cases, it tries to create songs by capturing and replicating "the [lyrical] styles and voices of singers" whose music was used to train the system in the first place.

Previous effort

Jukebox AI's songs are available online

OpenAI has been working on music-making AI for quite a few years and had already developed 'MuseNet' to generate full-length MIDI tracks with tones and compositions. The new Jukebox system has also been trained like MuseNet, but it clearly goes a step ahead by bringing in vocal parts and lyrics across a range of genres. Some of its songs are already available on SoundCloud.

Gaps

Still, some gaps need to be filled

The researchers used over 1.2 million songs to train Jukebox, but even after that, they said there are many limitations that make its creations different from normal music. For instance, the team said, "The generated songs show local musical coherence, follow traditional chord patterns, and can even feature impressive solos, [but] we do not hear familiar larger musical structures such as choruses that repeat".

Twitter Post

Some have also raised questions over Jukebox's voice replication ability