AI generates Christmas songs with all the right jingle bells and whistles

Image: inarik/Istock via AFP Relaxnews

Swedish artificial intelligence (AI) company Made by AI took a break from developing their AI-designed sterling silver and gold necklaces to put some different technology to work creating some new holiday tunes.

Even though there are already seemingly countless Christmas songs and more pop up each winter, there are a few distinctive traits that most of them encapsulate to alert listeners that they’re enjoying a holiday song: the jingling of yuletide sleigh bells, the ringing tones of a celeste or set of chimes, the gentle taps of a glockenspiel. Made by AI was able to tune into the characteristics that give Christmas tunes their recognizable flair using deep learning and created some new themed tracks themselves.

The company used Long-short Term Memory (LSTM) recurrent neural networks to analyze about a hundred Christmas songs in MIDI format; the LSTM network would “learn” and store the notes, chords, and musical patterns present in each piece in order to use them to generate new tunes. Once the AI was trained, the songs could be further customized in terms of duration and instrument; in a particular case, the glockenspiel, bells and clarinet were used as main instruments.

Made by AI currently has five Christmas tracks up on SoundCloud for your listening pleasure. Among them are songs titled Cocoa Jollyfluff, Cinnamon Hollybells and Merry Jinglelog, names that sound incredibly festive even though they also don’t really make sense. At any rate, you have a handful of new tunes to add to your holiday playlist inspired by dozens of existing Christmassy tracks. JB

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