Rage of the machine: An AI makes metal music

Rage of the machine: An AI makes metal music

Rage of the machine: An AI* makes metal music

“Automated music generation has a rich history, with much of the recent work focusing on auto-regressive models using transformers. There are literally hundreds of research papers and even an open-source framework for music generation. However, during my initial research, I couldn’t find anything quite up to the task— most research focuses on piano music which isn’t what ear-shattering metal tracks are usually made off. Andrew Shaw’s musicautobot looked pretty close though. I’d have to do some coding myself, but nothing too difficult as most of the building blocks already exist.

So, I rolled up my sleeves and scraped 3,604 midi songs from a Russian MIDI website (not linking it here but if you were to, say, type “Russian MIDI website” into Google, who knows what you might find). Metallica, Nine Inch Nails, Korn, Radiohead… you name it. After transposing each song a couple of half steps in either direction I ended up with 18k full MIDI songs for training my model. I also wrote a MIDI tokenizer with support for multiple instruments and percussion, borrowing the notation from musicautobot and the BAR event from Pop Music Transformer…”

Source: muellerberndt.medium.com/rage-of-the-machine-an-ai-makes-metal-music-f299dc1f706a