Spoiler Alert: This didn’t work. At all. And the outputs are terrifying.
The audio files here are all a bit… bizarre. Mind your speaker volume and carry on with an open mind.
Jukebox the Model
OpenAI recently released their Jukebox program for creating new music samples when given a genre, artist, and optional sample lyrics. It produces absolute, horrifying magic. In that playlist alone there is a stunning cover of City of Stars from La La Land by Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald and an oddly funky cover of Baby Shark by The Wiggles. Like their other projects, this model is easy to jump into and play around with both locally and via a Colab. Just be warned, this one takes a long time to run. I have been experimenting with 30 second snippets of music and this will take upwards of five hours with the standard model. If you try this on your own (and I hope that you do!) I highly recommend queuing up the program on Colab and then going to bed for the night so you can wake up to some new piece of art in the morning.
Hopes and Dreams Abound
My high school’s alma mater is actually just Cornell’s Far Above Cayuga’s Waters with new lyrics that aren’t about tuberculosis. I figured it’s about time we got a melody of our own, and why not have it inspired by some popular musicians? I fed it the lyrics to the alma mater, “Whitney High School is our pride, our hopes and dreams abound” and let the algorithm work its magic.
Kanye West, Hip Hop, 30 seconds
Here is Kanye West doing a Hip Hop rendition. With a little effort you can hear the lyrics! This one has my vote to become the new standard.
Frank Sinatra, Classic Pop, 45 seconds
Frank took some creative liberties in the middle of this run, but he pulled it off in the end! I would not complain if this became the new official version.
Justin Bieber, Pop, 45 seconds
This is Justin Bieber’s Pop rendition. There is no denying it has some crowd appeal.
There Was An Attempt
Even with the generous standard for a successful rendition set by the two above, the rest of the experiment did not turn out particularly well. Please enjoy these attempts at the alma mater as deep pieces of modern art.
Compressed Justin Bieber, Pop, 45 seconds
This draft of Justin Bieber’s Pop cover is actually a hardware error more so than the program. It ran out of memory when decompressing the output of the model and so we have this noisy version here.
Drake, R&B, 60 seconds
Here Drake attempted a longer, 60-second R&B take on the alma mater. There are some fun moments, and the ending crescendo is pretty great, but somewhere along the line the lyrics got lost. What a shame, I had high hopes for this one.
BTS, K-Pop, 30 seconds
Of course I had to do a BTS, K-Pop rendition. Unfortunately something went terribly wrong and instead we now have this eldritch abomination. Enjoy!