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Since Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, Nirvana fans have speculated about what music he would have made if he had lived. But other than “You know you’re right,” the scabrous and heart-wrenching meditation on the confusion Nirvana recorded months before his suicide, and a few comments he told confidants about a potential collaboration with Michael Stipe at REM or to go completely solo, he mostly left question marks.
Now, an organization has created a “new” song Nirvana using artificial intelligence software to approximate the singer-guitarist’s writing. Guitar riffs vary from calm, “Come as You Are” – style plucking to rage, Bleach “Scoff” fury. And lyrics like “The sun is shining on you but I don’t know how”, and a surprisingly anthemic chorus, “I don’t care / I feel like one, drowned in the sun”, evocative bear, Cobain-esque qualities .
But aside from the vocals – the work of Nirvana tribute band frontman Eric Hogan – the song’s creators say almost everything about the song, from phrase turns to reckless guitar performance, is the work of computers. Their intention is to draw attention to the tragedy of Cobain’s death by suicide and how living musicians can get help with depression.
The aria, titled “Drowned in the Sun,” is part of Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, a project featuring songs written and performed primarily by machines in the style of other musicians who died at age 27: Jimi Hendrix , Jim Morrison and Amy Maison de vigneron. Each track is the result of AI programs analyzing up to 30 songs from each artist and granularly studying vocal melodies, chord changes, guitar riffs and solos, drum patterns and lyrics to guess what their “new” compositions would look like. The project is the work of Over the Bridge, a Toronto-based organization that helps members of the music industry with mental illness.
“Drowned in the Sun” (in the style of Nirvana)
“What if all these musicians we love had mental health support?” says Sean O’Connor, who sits on the board of Over the Bridge and also works as creative director for advertising agency Rethink. “Somehow in the music industry, [depression] is normalized and romanticized… Their music is perceived as genuine suffering.
To create the songs, O’Connor and his team used Google’s AI program Magenta, which learns to compose in the style of given artists by analyzing their works. Previously, Sony used the software to create a “new” Beatles song, and electropopist group Yacht used it to write their 2019 album. Triggering the chain.
For the Lost Tapes project, Magenta analyzed the artists’ songs as MIDI files, which function similar to a player-piano scrolling by translating pitch and rhythm into digital code that can be fed by a synthesizer to recreate a song. After examining each artist’s note choices, rhythmic quirks, and harmony preferences in the MIDI file, the computer creates new music for staff to explore to select the best moments.
“The more MIDI files you type, the better,” says O’Connor. “So we took 20 to 30 songs from each of our artists as MIDI files and split them into a single hook, solo, vocal melody, or rhythm guitar and went through them one at a time. If you put whole songs, [the program] start to get really confused about what [it’s] supposed to look like. But if you just have a bunch of riffs, it’ll produce about five minutes of new AI-written riffs, 90% of which are really bad and unplayable. So you start to listen and find interesting little moments. “
O’Connor and his team used a similar process for speaking, using a generic AI program called an artificial neural network. They were able to grab the artist’s words and start with a few words and the program guessed the cadence and tone of the poetry to complement it. “It was a lot of trial and error,” says O’Connor, adding that the team looked at “pages and pages” of lyrics for turns of phrase that syllabically match the vocal melodies produced by Magenta.
“Man, I know” (in the style of Amy Winehouse)
Once the compositions were in place, an audio house arranged all the different parts to evoke the musician. “A lot of the instrumentation was MIDI with different effects added,” O’Connor says of the completed recordings. Then they started recruiting singers. “Most of the people we brought in were working tribute artists to these bands, so they could kind of make the inflections and make it as realistic as possible,” says O’Connor.
Eric Hogan has been in the front Atlanta’s Nevermind: The Ultimate Tribute to Nirvana for six years. The group started out as a single lark for Halloween; an excuse for Hogan and his friends to perform the Foo Fighters, Stone Temple Pilots and Nirvana tribute sets. But when they saw the huge reaction from their Nirvana set, they went to grunge. When asked by the Over the Bridge crew to sing on “Drented in the Sun,” he thought the project was both amazing (in the most literal sense of the word) and cool. “After the conversation, I still didn’t really think it was a real thing,” he says. “And then they sent me files and money.”
When he heard the music for the first time, he was stunned. “I was like, ‘I don’t know how [sing] this, ”he recalls. “I had to make the guy who invented the AI track mum and hum [the tune]. I would feel weird trying to guess what [Cobain] would do. They must have given me a little roadmap, and from there everything was fine.
O’Connor and his team spent about a year researching and developing the songs and an additional six months completing the recordings. While they were working, they sought out the artists’ superfans to help them control themselves for potential plagiarism. They feared the Doors-esque tune, “The Roads Are Alive,” might sound a little too much like this band’s “Peace Frog”, but ultimately decided it didn’t. “A sound engineer took ‘Peace Frog’ and played it for us,” says O’Connor. “He’s like, ‘That’s what’ Peace Frog ‘does; that’s what it does. It’s different. OK, now we’re comfortable with that.
“The roads are alive” (in the style of the gates)
Nirvana has proven to be one of the most difficult artists to approach for machines. While an artist like Hendrix would often build songs like “Purple Haze” and “Fire” with easily definable riffs, Cobain frequently played big punky chord progressions that confused computers. “You tended to have a wall of sound,” O’Connor says of the Nirvana-inspired music produced by Magenta. “There is less identifiable thread running through all of their songs to give you that big piece of catalog that the machine could just learn from and create something new from.”
“[‘Drowned in the Sun’] is precise enough to give you that [Nirvana] vibe, but not so specific as to where someone is going to get a cease-and-desist letter, ”Hogan says. “If you watch the latest version of Nirvana without a quote, which was ‘You know you’re right’, it has the same kind of vibe. Kurt would sort of write whatever he wanted to write. And if he loved her, then it was a Nirvana song. I can hear some things in the arrangement of [‘Drowned in the Sun’] like, ‘OK, that’s kind of In the womb vibe here or a It does not matter vibe here. … I really understood the AI.
Hogan says he especially enjoyed the lyrics the computer concocted. In his opinion, Cobain’s lyrics have always been “kind of a mishmash”, but he thinks these lyrics are more direct without losing sight of the typical Cobain messages. “It sounded like a complete thought,” he says.
“The song says, ‘I’m a nutcase, but I like it,’” he said. “That’s Kurt Cobain’s total over there. The feeling is exactly what he would have said. ‘The sun is shining on you, but I don’t know how’ – it’s awesome. Basically what I take away from the song is, “I’m f-ed up, and you’re f-ed up. The difference is, I’m okay with it and you’re not. (When Hogan heard the music, he offered to play the guitar himself, but the producers refused, opting for a machine.)
So is “Drowned in the Sun” some sort of Frankenstein creation, existing in contempt of God and the universe? “I don’t know if I’m the best one to talk to about ethics,” Hogan laughs. “I mean, I travel across the country pretending to be someone.
“You are going to kill me” (in the style of Jimi Hendrix)
“I think you’re going to have a lot of people who are going to vilify this and look at it like, ‘Oh, that’s the death of real music,’ he continues. ‘But I totally agree with that. Used as a tool, I think it’s pretty cool. I don’t know what’s going to happen legally in the future. Once you start going where it starts to sound really good, maybe you start. to have a problem with that. “
The intention of Over the Bridge is simply to promote awareness of mental health resources; the organization runs a Facebook page that offers support, as well as Zoom sessions and workshops to educate artists and make them feel less alone. (They don’t intend to sell the pieces.) “Sometimes just the recognition of another person saying, ‘I feel the same as you’ is enough for people to at least feel like they have some kind of support, ”says Michael Scriven, representative of Lemmon Entertainment whose CEO sits on the board of Over the Bridge.
Scriven hopes the project will also raise awareness of the amount of work going into AI music. “There’s an inordinate amount of human hands at the start, middle and end to create something like this,” he says. “A lot of people can think [AI] will replace musicians at some point, but at this point the number of humans needed to get to a point where a song is playable is actually quite large. Each song required the work of O’Connor, a Magenta technician, a music producer, a sound engineer and the singers. “We’re not going to push a button and replace these artists,” says O’Connor.
“I wish [the Over the Bridge people] go further with AI, ”says Hogan. “There is so much more in this category that you can do.”
If you are struggling with thoughts of harming yourself, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. You can also access the crisis text line by sending TALK to 741741.
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