Originally Posted by Matt Finley
Can someone fill in the blanks for me please. This sounds like a Sinatra song with a Nelson Riddle big band arrangement but I don’t know the song melody or the words. So I assume the lyrics are by someone named Cobain. I think I’ve heard of him. Kurt? Then the real words of the song I don’t know were replaced by AI?
Correct. The song is Smells Like Teen Spirit, which was a huge hit for Nirvana, Kurt Cobain's band.

Someone arranged it in the style a Nelson Riddle, big-band arrangement. That's a feat in itself. I'm guessing they build the arrangement from samples of actual Frank Sinatra songs and sounds from sample libraries. With programs like Spleeter, it's possible to disassemble songs into parts (bass/drum/vocal/keys/other). Using pitch and time shifting, it's possible to re-assemble these parts into a reasonably good pastiche of a new song.

They then sang the song in the style of Frank Sinatra, and used RVC (Retrieval Based Voice Conversion) replace the timbre of their voice with Frank Sinatra's.

Edit: After some research, it looks like the material was lifted from Paul Anka's version of the song, and it's likely Paul Anka's voice was used as well.

RVC is a neural network-based tool that, when given audio input, identifies the phonemes of the input and stores that data. It can then change the timbre of any voice to the trained target. It only changes the timbre of the voice, so for the illusion to work well, the source voice should have the same style, inflection, and general performance attributes of the target.

Last edited by dcuny; 11/16/23 04:07 PM. Reason: Found the Paul Anka big band cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"
-- David Cuny
My virtual singer development blog

Vocal control, you say. Never heard of it. Is that some kind of ProTools thing?