And now for something completely different. We mean completely, utterly different. It’s a little known fact that a majority of the folks on Stuff‘s creative team (editorial and design) are big into metal. We’ve run the numbers and it’s… anomalous. It also means that Throwback Thursdays can sometimes get a little rowdy. And now team Stuff has found an AI-generated project that it can really get behind (while throwing some horns and trying not to break too many ribs in the pit). Meet Dadabots.
Dadabots is a musical project that uses a neural network to produce music. Heavy music. Death metal, if you want to put a label on it, though we’d add that there are some grindcore and a whole mess of machine-gun bass. And at least a few arguments in the making, for genre purists. You know who you are. Nobody’s impressed.
What you really need to know is that Dadabots’ tunes are fast, brutal, and created entirely by computer. And there’s a constant live-stream of the neural network’s output on YouTube.
Lunatic of Bot’s Creation
CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, the bot’s creators, recently opened the YouTube channel showcasing what their creation can do. The neural network identifies patterns in the music it studies and then recreates them. Because why the hell not? It seems that the neural network has greater success recreating faster-paced music (like technical death, grindcore, straight-up death, and a mashup of other heavy genres) than more sedate fare.
The creators say, “While we set out to achieve a realistic recreation of the original data, we were delighted by the aesthetic merit of its imperfections. Solo vocalists become a lush choir of ghostly voices, rock bands become crunchy cubist-jazz, and cross-breeds of multiple recordings become a surrealist chimaera of sound”. But the winner seems to be metal.
If you want to dive a little deeper into the science behind this Heavy AF AI, there’s a scholarly article for you to peruse. If, on the other hand, you just want to bask in what a musical machine future might sound like, then let the dulcet tones of Dadabot’s auto-generated output sing you gently to sleep… Just kidding, if this puts you to sleep, it’s probably going to involve a hammer-smashed face.
Up next for the project? Audience interaction, and the removal of humans from metal. Apparently. In the meantime, hit up the so-called band’s Bandcamp page (below) and check out the ten albums that have been put together from its output.