PG Music Home Forums General Discussion Off-Topic Automatic Lyric Generation

The paper behind the technology: Markov Constraints for Generating Lyrics with Style

Unfortunately, I can't find the software anywhere, and the examples that were auto-generated have been removed from the site.

I'm really tempted to try implementing this. Constraining Markov chains by removing states from transitions, and then working backwards to ensure arc consistency sounds complex, but the implementation is actually pretty straight forward.

these generated lyrics actually sound as abstract or 'deep' as some of my favorite bands' of all time - YES - and they did it without the generator...now therein lies the talent. Computers are making me (I don't know about anyone else) less and less special in my 'limited to human' talents - hek even BB has made my music generation feel less special.

I know that's not a healthy attitude, but there was a time I felt special to be able to do things a computer could not - now I'm often aspiring to do musical things that it seems a computer can do much, much better than I.

This program has only the shallowest of "understanding" of the lyrics it generates. Any continuity of thought or building of an idea is purely coincidental.

On the other hand, tools like this can "mash up" lyrics and help serve as springboards of ideas.

And that's really where the human skill comes in - being able to recognize a potentially interesting idea, and craft it into something great.

Dave, there is a tool that is used by some of the folks that participate in the February Album Writing Month challenge that has some aspects of this. It's written by Burr Settles - the guy who started the FAWM challenge:

http://muse.fawm.org/

Take a look at Lyric Cloud - it doesn't construct sentences, but it does have usefulness as a 'spark'.

That's fantastic!

Pretty soon we'll have programs that can write songs for us in our sleep!

Isn't it interesting how musicians respond with glee when yet another computer program eliminates one more step in the music making process that human beings used to occupy?

If we're really lucky, the human element will be totally removed from the music making process and it will take yet another burden from humanity.

Who needs ideas when a computer can supply them for us?

So let’s review:

We have BIAB because we can’t rely on our musician friends to show up, and even if they do, we can’t rely on them being sober enough to play.

We have AutoTune because we can’t sing in key.

Now we have “Automatic Lyric Generation” because we can’t come up with our own ideas for lyrics to a song.

I’ve already predicted that we’ll soon have Auto Solo because we’re not capable of playing a decent instrumental solo on our own.

What’s left? As soon as we figure that out, we can relieve ourselves from the burden of creating music!

All we’ll need to do is sit back and listen to what the computer programs have created for us.

Who needs musicians, singers and songwriters anyway?

Actually, it's the computer programmer in me that's fascinated.

The musician in me knows my time is better spent on other things.

“We have BIAB because we can’t rely on our musician friends to show up, and even if they do, we can’t rely on them being sober enough to play.”


There goes that old broad brush again, Bob. Personally, my primary reason for buying BIAB was to produce song demos without having to pay exorbitant studio costs. It's ability to produce great backing tracks for live performance is an added bonus.
Very few people have a drummer, piano player, bass player, and a string quartet at their beck and call, and BIAB has allowed them to produce music that never would have been heard otherwise.


“We have AutoTune because we can’t sing in key.”


Do you sing? Can you deliver a note-perfect performance of a difficult piece, without an off note? I often can't, and I sing every day. Ever hear of “punching-in” vocals in the studio? Some of the best singers have used that technique for years. Is it “cheating”? Of course. But that doesn't make it musically “sinful”, or some kind of esoteric abomination, any more than fixing an errant note in AT does.

While 90db and I often disagree on many topics, he's preaching to the choir on this one.

I too bought BB/RB to save on demo session costs. Specifically, the steel guitar player. The cost of the everything pack is less than a decent session will cost using some of the hottest pickers in music city. Of course, I haven't checked on Nashville studio rates recently, but I think you'd still be hard pressed to get a good quality demo done with all the instruments available in BB and have it done to your satisfaction at that cost or below. And that would be for one or two songs at most.

Melodyne/autotune (pitch correction) same deal.... yeah, everyone that's recording music now days uses pitch correction because even the best of the best flub notes in a soulful performance. The Beatles didn't have ME or AT so they often spent several days just working on the vocal tracks to a 2 minute 30 second song.

OK... now, to the topic.... lyric generation software. I've not seen nor heard of this but it's a matter of time before it's on the market.

As I see it, it would not be the golden ticket to writing hit songs because the lyrics that tend to touch the human heart, come from the human heart to start with.

It may however be a useful tool to get the ideas flowing, much in the same way I use a software package called MasterWriter2. MW2 has a rhyming dictionary that is nothing short of amazing.

Ask the average person or songwriter to name as many rhymes as they can for a given word and the result will be perhaps a dozen or so words....With MW2, type in a word and it will give you anywhere from one to 40 or more PAGES of words that rhyme in one of multiple ways. If that doesn't help, after reviewing all the different words on the 40 or so pages of rhymes, you can switch to the PHRASES mode and now, it's giving you page after page of one line phrases designed to help kick start your creative process. Some work, most don't but, the way I use this process is to come up with something else that more closely fits my song.

I run into a number of folks in other forums who are down on folks like me (and you) who use BB/RB because they deem us to be "cheating" since there are not real people playing the parts. But that's not my problem. I have a well recorded and well played song that suits my purposes nicely and to me, that's what matters the most. If I had to rely on other musicians to lay down tracks for me, or attempt to learn to play the other instruments I want in my music, and play them at the professional level I seek, I'd be doing nothing all day but practicing one instrument after another after another.....

To those "purists", I like to ask them if they use softsynths and drum programs.....

There is an old song from 1986 by Reinhard Mey, a German singer-songwriter, who laments about this in his song "Musik wie von Hand gemacht". I've run the lyrics through Google translate and enhanced the English a little bit:

A piece of music made ​​by hand

(Song of Reinhard Mey)

Text taken from the "official Reinhard Mey website".

In the heyday of fast food civilization,
The standard opinion, the taste automation,
The plastic feelings and the high-tech lust,
The disposable one-way relationship with the frustration,
At the time of dreams to go from the Dream Factory,
The Mickey Mouse culture and music out of the socket.

Since I praise me a piece of music made ​​by hand,
Yet devised by a real man with his head,
A guitar that just sounds like a guitar,
And a voice that sounds as if someone is singing.
Hold a piece of music of flesh and blood,
All right, sometimes with a small error, which is good,
It gets going and works always and everywhere,
Also at the end of the world at night and power failure!

When the big, wild rock and rollers rock and roll,
With amazing laser show on the stage romps,
If the speakers are booming and the hall roof swings,
That takes me out of the break and the glasses jumps,
Then think I mind that, if now someone turns on the fuse,
The Rockstar quiet as a mouse, meek and in the darkl.

Chorus

When I use the bus and the ticket validator I
Can not operate and must dodge the fair again,
If the waterworks turn off the source,
Because I did not learn to understand you computer account,
If I have to accept that I can't activate the HiFi Tower,
Because I now even can not turn on the automatic switch.

Chorus

Until the day when they downsized me
Or simply rejected as non-programmable,
If the great computer monitors all
My preferences and quirks are powerfully grasped,
Even though I am already completely machine-readable
With a bar code on the willy and a checksum digit on the chin.

Chorus

Source: http://www.reinhard-mey.de/start/texte/alben/ein-st%C3%BCck-musik-von-hand-gemacht
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRbeXlAZAoc

Edit: I just checked the song's publishing year: 1986

The only time I listen to the radio nowadays is when I'm in a vehicle. When a new song comes on that I like, it's usually because it has either a "catchy" tune or "catchy" lyrics.

I've never wondered, has the tune been autogenerated? or was the singer's voice auto-tuned? Is that a musician playing the drums or a "Real Track"? etc.

...and personally, from some of the "stuff" you hear on the radio lately, I would have been glad if they would have let a lyric generator write the words, rather than listen to the same 5-word phrase they sing 27 times and call it a "song" <grin>.

LLOYD S

A cheat I use to jump start or 'auto-generate' song lyrics is to study lists, guides, bulletins, or anything that can be considered an outline. Rearranging and modifying phrases can become the outline to develop a song's lyrical theme or message.

I posted a song in the User Forum some time back called "Trucks" where the lyrics all came from a Facebook video's comment section of viewers thoughts and reaction to a video about country Rednecks.

Charlie

90db,



The only brush I was using was humor. I thought it was funny that we were debating auto tune on the other thread and then the Automatic Lyric Generation thread shows up.

So I’ll quote your comment to me on the other thread:



Hehe

The Lyric Cloud link I pointed to is just a tool in the toolbox. Not unlike a rhyming dictionary.

Writing lyrics is an entirely different process than learning to play an instrument - excepting that both take lots of practice, and both involve some type of pattern based tools in the woodshed.

Sorry Bob. I should have recognized your legendary sense of humor. Hehe.

After tinkering with this for a couple of days, I got a version of it running.

It's interesting, and a bit frustrating. The biggest problem is that it's much too easy to over-constrain the sentence, so nothing can be generated.

Another problem is that my version of the program does a really bad job of figuring out what the correct part of speech the template is, and too many words in the dictionary have alternate functions. For example 'A' can be an noun (referring to the letter) or an indefinite article (more common).

Since computers generally follow Murphy's Law, this means that it'll tend to pick the word that fits the constraint, but makes the least amount of sense. This also leads to a lot of repeated words, for reasons that are simply irritating.

Finally, I didn't get around to implementing a "topic" constraint, so my program can't force the noun to be associate with "love" or "anger". So the output is even more random.

I picked the opening of Hotel California as my template:

On a dark desert highway cool wind in my hair
Warm smell of colitas, rising up through the air
Up ahead in the distance, I saw a shimmering light
My head grew heavy and my sight grew dim
I had to stop for the night

The first problem is that colitas isn't in the dictionary, so substitution was called for. Then came the more subtle stuff, like dark desert highway, which is wonderfully alliterative, but has two adjectives in a row - something that wasn't very common in the source material, so there was no possible solution.

To get past this, I finally put the verse itself into the database, which got past that problem. Using a database built with the poems of Edger Allen Poe, I got:

By a dark desert highway
cool wind in all there
passed as but then he dances
by from the air up ahead in her
angel so fair a passionate light
how deep rest looking like strains still is light
we loved so come up the knight

Yep - it fit the constraints, but is still complete gibberish.

From thy dark desert highway cool wind in my hair
warm smell of so all beauty by from the air
so above in her sovereign he where a tremulous light
on air near sober but she said
art sure thou art not be to her flight

Not really any better. This is what Eric Woolfson produced:

From a dark desert highway cool wind in my hair
warm smell of blue all standing on to the air
up ahead in the river i seem a different light
now he is flying so free rain fall
on you can light is through the light

Yep. More gibberish. Fiddling with constraint can bring better results:

Feel a on golden threshold stone shall the sun where
dwell when with many it utters is light in air

Or:

Than the dark desert highway cool wind in an air
have left by our high mountain of blue the air

Constraining it not to reuse rhymes is possible, but I'm not particularly encouraged to keep the project up. The main problem is that the program simply has no understanding. So while you could eventually guide it into generating something useful, you'll never get it to write anything remotely compelling.

It was interesting, but I've got better things to do with my time.

Yeah, I'll go with that..... just write from your heart and it will all work out fine

Human brain kicks in and beats a computer.
From the first line,

On a dark deserted highway
I've been driving far to long
while the radio is playing
a soft and soulful song

It reminds me of my sweetheart
a thousand miles away
I am driving there to see her
I will get there come what may.

So, someone fit a tune to that, and add some more lyrics if you want. Computers, gahhh who needs 'em eh?

A computer may be able to generate words and phrases that sound good together or that present an interesting dialogue, but until a computer can understand and interpret human emotions it will never truly write a good song. It may produce a catchy hook or a mediocre pop ditty, but it take human understanding and experience to write a masterful song lyric.