Have you ever wondered how musicians write music? Do you think it’s possible to technically generate a composition and write lyrics to music? Like writing a program that could compose and simulate a song? Understanding and creating music by humans has always been a very mysterious concept owing to the complexity of the human brain.
However, this certain genre of music called rap music was able to be simulated through an algorithm that gleans rap lyrics based on rhyming from a collective database of rap songs and produces a song on its own song – a project called “DeepBeat”. Rap music generally has a steady beat, a story line of some sort and a rhyming scheme. This led to a team of researchers to write an algorithm that is able to produce a song on its own.
So these researchers, keeping in mind these collective rules, have done a widespread research on rap music and then put efforts to have a computer create its own rap songs.
The research consisted of gathering more than a 10,000 rap songs, with over a 100 artists represented and putting the lyrics into a database. Then, routine was written and executed that looked at rhyming in the songs, most particularly , those called assonance, which is where similar vowel sounds are repeated. The researchers concluded that this rhythm and rhyming pattern was rampant in the rap lyrics and therefore, decided to make a feature of their song using algorithm.
Before the algorithm could be written however, a neural network had to be created to examine the lyrics in the database and learn something about the rhyming that was present in them, and when it had to be placed etc. Then the algorithm was written, which works by scanning the lyrics, then using information from the neural network to pick a line that could be used – over and over until a complete song has been written.
All that said and done, the rap song generated did resemble a rap song but it lacked emotion, something that any good song should have; despite the rhythm and lyrics. I mean, teach a computer emotions and it might just take a step ahead of humans!
But I bet this rap song algorithm is much better than many rap artists today though.
Also Read: Some of the Weirdest and Awesomest Music Genres You Probably Have Never Heard Of
