UvA students and researchers compete in AI Song Contest

Can artificial intelligence help compose a successful Eurovision hit? Team Can AI Kick It, consisting for the most part of staff and students from the University of Amsterdam and the University of Utrecht as well as rapper Willie Wartaal, collaborated with AI to create the song 'Abbus' and is squaring off against twelve other teams from Europe and Australia in the VPRO's AI Song Contest. Stepping out of their comfort zone. Ashley Burgoyne, lecturer in Computational Musicology and leader of the UvA part of the team, is impressed with the quality of their song and with how the project turned out to be a real group effort. "Everyone's input can be discerned in the song," he says. The team's success was not beyond doubt from the start, however. Although the Netherlands has a strong history of research into computational musicology - for instance at the UvA, the UU, and the TU Delft - music generation is a beast of its own, and one that has been given much more attention abroad. Burgoyne tells us that this was the team's biggest insecurity: "We were not sure if we would be able to succeed, because we really do not have specialists in the field of music generation within the Netherlands." "Luckily, during the team's first meeting in December 2019, Master's student Computational Science Arran Lyon provided a stepping stone: in his spare time, he had already developed a music collective that automatically generates music based on neural networks.