Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning are opening opportunities for brands to personalise sound like never before.
Earlier this month, a team of Australians used AI and machine learning to win the inaugural Eurovision AI contest held by Dutch public broadcaster VPRO.
The contest was initially planned to run alongside the original Eurovision competition in the Netherlands this year but ended up running in lieu of it due to pandemic restrictions.
The team, music tech collective Uncanny Valley, used an AI trained on Eurovision songs to create the melody and lyrics as well as blending audio samples of Australian animals including koalas, kookaburras and Tasmanian devils with a real producer and vocalists.
Uncanny Valley producer and strategist Caroline Pegram says the win highlights the co-creative opportunities that AI and machine learning can bring to a variety of industries including advertising.
“The competition brought together the top minds in this field to explore the idea of what can be achieved when musicians rage with the machines,” Pegram says.
“The fact that we were able to use technology to blend in the message of the devastation of the bushfires in Australia early this year, clearly struck a chord.”
Uncanny Valley is made up of a diverse team with a variety of academic backgrounds including maths, computer science, social anthropology, evolutionary and adaptive systems, music and computer science and interactive design.
The team was inspired after collaborating on a recent project with Google’s Creative Lab in Sydney, which uses machine learning to advance music innovation.
Uncanny Valley head of innovation Charlton Hill says the team are now starting to work with brands to use AI as a tool for experiential storytelling through sound.
“The surprising results that we can deliver takes creativity and art to a new place, but then it also provides a fantastic story behind the creation of the campaign and the art,” Hill says.
“I think that that's what's inspiring from a commercial perspective, [to] the marketeers whose interests we've peaked with what we're up to.”
He says the Eurovision win has been a great “showcase piece” for where AI can take personalisation in advertising and the arts.
Hill, alongside co-founder Justin Shave, have backgrounds in writing and producing songs for both advertising and renowned artists including Sia and Darren Hayes.
Over the last decade, they have been working towards finding a way to automate some of the music making process while maintaining some human emotion.
Shave says one way they have done this is with a music generation system called Memu.
“If you design a system that can input any kind of variables - whether that be personalized locations, musical preferences, anything like that - these musical systems can be taught to compose music based on those preferences in real-time,” Shave says.
“A lot of our research has been focused on finding particular emotions that are tweaked by certain musical ideas and sounds.
“I guess our experience in writing music for advertising has led us in this direction a little bit, but we're just taking it that one step further and working on systems to automate that stuff.”
An infinite live stream of music that never repeats, Memu uses a unique algorithm to intuitively select and combine elements of music, producing and mixing a real-time musical experience.
As the team continues to build out further solutions for brands using AI and machine learning, Hill says it is important to remember that successful end results are still reliant on human input.
“The heart of what we do is around human emotional response to music, and the need to quantify that simply because if you're working in AI systems, it's a mathematical universe, it needs to understand the language,” Hill says.
“We're going to continue to use the power of AI, but if we or advertisers miss the point that it's about human emotional response, it's just a piece of dumb code.”
The Uncanny Valley team is made up of Justin Shave, Charlton Hill and Caroline Pegram alongside data scientist Brendan Wright, senior lecturer and co-director of the Interactive Media Lab at the faculty of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales Oliver Bown, expert in algorithmic choral compositions and sonification Alexandra Uitdenbogerd and CEO of Cicada, Australia’s National Centre for Innovation Sally-Ann Williams.
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