AI Software Has Created A “New” Nirvana Song, And It’s Kinda Amazing
It's called 'Drowned In The Sun', and it's eerily close to a Nirvana original.
Artificial intelligence is one of those seismic discoveries that changes literally everything, so when news dropped overnight that an AI program had written a bunch of new songs from sadly departed artists — including Nirvana — it didn’t seem like much of a surprise.
Of course there would come a time when robots would start writing pastiches: it was as inevitable as the (still burgeoning) boom of holographic performers.
The real surprise, however, is that the songs are pretty good. AI is still developing, and a lot of the early attempts at computers writing music has been fairly janky; who could forget that time a robot tried to sing along to its own version of ‘All Star’ by Smash Mouth?
But these pastiches, which also include ‘new’ songs by Amy Winehouse and Jim Morrison, capture the tone of the originals while also pushing the music in new and interesting ways.
The project is known as The Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, and has been designed to bring attention to mental illness in the music industry. “What if all these musicians that we love had mental health support?” said Sean O’Connor, a member of the board of directors of Over the Bridge, the charity that has spearheaded the project. “Somehow in the music industry, [depression] is normalised and romanticised … Their music is seen as authentic suffering.”
Making the songs involved a lot of “trial and error”, O’Connor said, and required enlisting the help of musicians to sing the lyrics — that’s why those voices carrying the melody sound eerily, well, human.
Good music created for a good cause? Sounds pretty swell to me. Listen to the ‘new’ Nirvana song, ‘Drowned in the Sun’, as well as pastiches of Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse, below.