This morning the first Artificial Intelligence (AI) Song Contest was held with Australia taking out the win!
The project organised by Dutch public broadcasters featured songs created with the help of artificial intelligence and inspired by Eurovision.
13 teams from eight different countries in Europe and Australia participated in the inaugural event, with some countries even having multiple teams.
Australia was in 2nd place after the jury votes but a strong public vote got them over the line from the Germans in 2nd place, with the Dutch finishing 3rd.
The Australian team 'Uncanny Valley' are a Sydney-based production studio who worked with a team of computer scientists from RMIT University and the University of New South Wales
The team is made up of members with a variety of academic backgrounds including computer science, maths, social anthropology, evolutionary & adaptive systems, music, and interactive design.
‘Beautiful The World’ was created by training a neural network on audio samples of the calls of Kookaburras, Tasmanian Devils, and Koalas, as well as a pool of 200 Eurovision songs (you might be able to hear the influence of works such as ‘Ding-A-Dong’ and ‘Monsters’ in the song’s lyrics). The melody and lyrics were created using artificial intelligence, although human singers were later used to sing the melody, and a human producer helped bring the song to life.
Uncanny Valley views their work as a response to the recent Australian bushfires which took the lives of many native animals, and the actual audio output generated by the AI trained on the sounds of these animals can be heard in the final recording.
Their message is one of “hope that nature will recover and triumph”. Although the team’s message is important, Uncanny Valley has stated that their main priority was that the song should be “fun” and “a song you could play on your guitar around a campfire”.
A huge congratulations from Aussievision to the Australian team for getting us a first, of sorts, Eurovision win!