LyricJam Sonic: A Generative System for Real-Time Composition and Musical Improvisation
This addresses a specific workflow challenge for electronic music artists and sound designers by providing a creativity support tool to enhance real-time music creation, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing AI and music retrieval concepts.
The paper tackles the problem of electronic musicians struggling to rediscover suitable audio segments from extensive recordings by introducing LyricJam Sonic, a generative system that uses a bi-modal AI approach to match generated lyrics with past audio clips and create continuous, evolving music and lyrics in real-time, enabling live composition and improvisation.
Electronic music artists and sound designers have unique workflow practices that necessitate specialized approaches for developing music information retrieval and creativity support tools. Furthermore, electronic music instruments, such as modular synthesizers, have near-infinite possibilities for sound creation and can be combined to create unique and complex audio paths. The process of discovering interesting sounds is often serendipitous and impossible to replicate. For this reason, many musicians in electronic genres record audio output at all times while they work in the studio. Subsequently, it is difficult for artists to rediscover audio segments that might be suitable for use in their compositions from thousands of hours of recordings. In this paper, we describe LyricJam Sonic -- a novel creative tool for musicians to rediscover their previous recordings, re-contextualize them with other recordings, and create original live music compositions in real-time. A bi-modal AI-driven approach uses generated lyric lines to find matching audio clips from the artist's past studio recordings, and uses them to generate new lyric lines, which in turn are used to find other clips, thus creating a continuous and evolving stream of music and lyrics. The intent is to keep the artists in a state of creative flow conducive to music creation rather than taking them into an analytical/critical state of deliberately searching for past audio segments. The system can run in either a fully autonomous mode without user input, or in a live performance mode, where the artist plays live music, while the system "listens" and creates a continuous stream of music and lyrics in response.