Experimental AI music

Music that never has to stop: an AI model writing a few bars at a time, each continuing from the last.

How it was made Listen on SoundCloud ↗

Tracks

**stream 17** Artificial Progressive Ambient Drum & Bass Hip hop, 85 bpm · 1:24

**stream 10** Experimental Artificial House Mix House, 140 bpm · 8:26

**stream 16** Mid Tempo Hip-Hop Artificial Beats Hip hop, 85 bpm · 6:52

**stream 09** Artificial Music Funky House Experiment House, 140 bpm · 4:19

**stream 08** Experimental Artificial House House, 140 bpm · 1:21

**stream 19** Experimental Artificial Low Fi Mystery Mix Lo-fi hip hop, 80 bpm · 8:15

How it was made

Each track was generated by MusicGen, Meta's text-to-music model, a few bars at a time. MusicGen only makes short clips, so a small code library was made to keep it going: every new chunk continues from the last few bars of the one before, under a text prompt that changes every few chunks, and a beat tracker checks each chunk is still at the right tempo. Chunks that are too far off are thrown away and generated again, and the ones that are close are time-stretched back onto the beat, so a track can run for as long as you like without drifting.

The prompts are lists of styles, taken at random: "Glam House with glittery synth sparkles", "Acid House with squelching synthesizers", "Chilled lo-fi hip hop beat, featuring soft piano and vinyl scratches". MusicGen doesn't follow a change of prompt precisely, so you can't bring an instrument in at a particular bar, but it's good at drifting from one style into the next. It can also wander off into something that's just unpleasant noise, so every run needed listening to: these six are the ones out of 28 that were good enough to publish.

Endless music with MusicGen explains how it works, with the code.

The covers

The covers come from Midjourney, and they all grew out of one picture of a "close up of woman's face made of porcelain, blue floral French Toile pattern painted on her face, hyper detailed". Each was found by zooming out with the same prompt over and over: every zoom shrinks the picture to half its size, paints a new one around it and offers four versions to pick from. The six covers are at the ends of different branches, 12 to 18 zoom-outs from that first face.

The picture at the top zooms in from the cover of stream 17 through the pictures behind it and back out, and while a track plays its cover zooms a couple of steps either way.

Technologies

Python - The code library that keeps MusicGen going and checks the tempo
MusicGen - Meta's text-to-music model, generating the music
Midjourney - The covers

Credits

Piotr Nierobisz - MusicGen engine, stream generation

More art

Polygonals - 3D fractal flights and shader visuals set to original music
Fractals - FractalToy, a 3D fractal explorer that renders live in the browser