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Meet Dadabots, The AI Death Metal Band Streaming on YouTube

Accepted submission by RandomFactor at 2019-04-24 02:38:21 from the how could they not call it Botty McBotband dept.
Software

In less than two years, the band Dadabots has ten albums to its name and has been streaming live 24x7 for a month without stop. [newatlas.com] Death Metal bands are weird. But this one is different.

Dadabots has no humans in it.

Dadabots is an AI that creates technical Death Metal genre music, and does it well enough that its creators have now decided that the algorithmically generated music is of sufficient quality that it can be streamed in real time at creation. Give it a listen here. [youtube.com] Love it or hate it, it's true to the genre and has been streaming non-stop since last month.

Dadabots is the brainchild of CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, a couple of musicians with a strong interest in algorithmically-generated music. For a couple of years now the duo has been working on developing a recurrent neural network that can produce original compositions after being trained on specific datasets from singular musical genres. Early experiments incorporated a variety of different genres, before the duo discovered metal and punk in particular seemed to be better suited to the erratic and often random nature of the algorithm.

"We observed that electronic music and hip-hop instrumentals did not seem to train as well as organic, electro-acoustic ensembles of musicians," Carr and Zukowski write in their most recent paper. "Music genres like metal and punk seem to work better, perhaps because the strange artifacts of neural synthesis (noise, chaos, grotesque mutations of voice) are aesthetically pleasing in these styles. Furthermore, their fast tempos and creative use of loose performance techniques translate well to SampleRNN's rhythmic distortions."

Dadabot's free albums are available here [bandcamp.com]. The album covers and song titles were also, naturally, algorithmically created.


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