Not long ago, the domestic network of the company “Yandex” has recorded an album in the style of the group “Civil defense”. Many regarded it as an isolated incident to draw attention to the development of the company. But as it turned out, after writing in Russian programmers have gone a step further and switched to a foreign group. For example, just recently recorded a few tracks in the style of the American rock band Nirvana.
Since that time programmers of Yandex Ivan Yamshchikov (who currently works at the Institute of scientific mathematics of the max Planck Society in Leipzig) and Alexei Tikhonov trained my neural network to compose poems in the English language similar to the lyrics of Kurt Cobain, the leader of the world-famous orchestra. The first album of the neural network in the style of the group “Civil defense” was recorded with professional musicians and was called “Neural defense”. By analogy with the previous project, the work on recording the album in the style of Nirvana attracted a professional American musician Rob Carroll, admirer of Kurt Cobain and his rock band. The album is called “Neurona”.
In order to train the network to write poetry in English, Ivan Yamschikova had to gather a huge archive of modern and classical foreign poetry totaling about 200 megabytes. During the work it became clear that to teach the neural network the language of Shakespeare is much more difficult than Russian. The fact that in English poetry is much less clearly defined rules and there is not always “normal” grammar. Therefore, the team of experts had to delete some texts from the archive. After the result satisfied the scientists, they recorded tracks on an old cassette tape album of Nirvana. The final result posted on the web and even posted the clip on one of the songs in YouTube. As stated by the developers, the algorithms of the neural network and the details of its development will be published soon in a scientific journal. In addition, the Russian publication RIA “Novosti” was able to interview Ivan yamschikova, the full text of which, as well as the clip on one of the tracks authored by the neural network you can find below.
Ivan, given the difficulties you faced when creating “Neurons”, have you tried to do something similar to texts of singer Linda, known for his unusual style of poetry?
A year ago we trained a neural network to generate lyrics in the style of Yegor Letov. In principle, nothing prevents to teach her to generate the texts and in the style of Linda.
If the neural network can now even write poetry and music, is there something that they will never be able to do in principle?
This is an interesting question to which there is no exact answer. The main thing to remember is that the neural network is not a character. It’s just the type of algorithm, a tool designed to solve a particular problem. How to formulate the problem, conditions, limitations, where to get the training data? With all these questions, for example, now works.
What made you write “Neuron” on the old cassette albums “Nirvana”?
We did the same with records “Neural defense”. It’s kind of a tradition. There is something very native sounding cassette player. No wonder that the Network always goes the picture with a pencil, old magazine and the caption “if you know how these items are related to each other, you lived in the 90s”.
Given the emergence of neural networks that can simulate the work of the famous people, it does not appear in the future, the temptation to introduce the right of ownership and copyright, not only on specific recordings, but also on the style of the artist, musician or composer?
It is rather a question for the experts from the field of law. In art, in General, while there is an element of exclusivity. The fact that the neural network can now mimic the style of van Gogh, not to devalue his work. There is an element of mediated communication between a person who created a work, and a person who saw, heard, read.
The neural network “Yandex” has recorded an album in the style of Nirvana
Vladimir Kuznetsov