14 ms·

A Teen Programmer Built a Tool to Generate Fake Lyrics for Your Favorite Artists

65 points by amasad 7y ago

aesthetics1 7y ago
This seems to generate mostly word salad. I haven't been able to find an artist (even one of the recommended artists like Drake) that it generates intelligible lyrics for. It seems to grab existing lyrics from other songs and mash them together, but it's not doing a great job of it.
- blu3r4d0n 7y ago
  Yeah, it just strings words together as far as I can tell.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    He says he used Markov Chains - which is just stringing words together based upon probability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain
- vonseel 7y ago
  Markov chains alone aren’t really the best solution for this, but you can find a few interesting snippets here and there in the output
- notus 7y ago
  The only reason this is on HN is because a teenager made it
  - rchaud 7y ago
    and so that HN'ers could heap scorn upon it while claiming that they could bang something out like this in a weekend. In this case though, I'd believe them.
gdcohen 7y ago
Brilliant. But doesn't quite work with older generation artists! A snippet from Elvis: "Just you in the time for it's just a rabbit Let's rock Happiness will"
lone_haxx0r 7y ago
Nothing special. Just good ol' Markov chains.
- gdcohen 7y ago
  Maybe nothing special, but pretty well executed by a teen!
  - curiousgal 7y ago
    I mean with the plethora of ressources available today, anything done by a teen today is not as impressive as something done by a teen say 10 or even 5 years ago.
    - damck 7y ago
      That's a really sad way of looking at things
      - curiousgal 7y ago
        Why is that?
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - PavlovsCat 7y ago
        It's not a "way of looking at things", it's a statement. A statement cannot be sad, and even if a statement makes someone sad, that doesn't make it false. edit: yeah, figures. When calling out ElsaGate, I got replies like "your argument is literally 'think of the children'". But in this thread it's all so heartwarming, or respectively turning statements that aren't dripping with soppy general statements that mean nothing into an "attitude" or "way of looking at things" (which remains BS, and reaching 500 karma and finding the downvote button doesn't make that false, either)
    - Bakary 7y ago
      As someone who didn't do much of note during his youth this is still impressive to me and I'm happy to encourage the author if I ever meet them.
JakeStone 7y ago
My current "flow" music is the Hamilton musical, so I threw in Lin-Manuel Miranda into it. The entire result was hot garbage. However, there were buried segments that were good, but I'd have to lay that on the tightness of Mr. Miranda's lyrics as we're dealing with Markov chains. All in all, that was a few minutes of amusement.
lostmsu 7y ago
Here's one, that uses OpenAI's GPT-2 to generate: http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/ http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/ Partial write-up: https://habr.com/post/453232/ https://habr.com/post/453232/ Took about 2 weeks to make, most on the website part. So if you want to teach your kid programming and some AI, it's not so hard.
- JakeStone 7y ago
  That was interesting, and if it had been an actual song (with a little bit of cleanup) would have made for interesting interpretation, depending how it was approached by music and singer. Then you get something like this: http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/song/3971156712 http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/song/3971156712 :D
  - lostmsu 7y ago
    I believe you can co-write music too. My original plan for expanding the project was to train on MIDI-karaoke files, and folks from OpenAI recenlty proved that actually works for MIDI with no text: https://openai.com/blog/musenet/ https://openai.com/blog/musenet/
OldSchoolJohnny 7y ago
There should be a life rule, if the word "teen" or "child" appears in any headline about some new "invention" or "app" you should immediately ignore that article as it's going to be some breathless gushing bullshit.
- thesephist 7y ago
  Thanks for that encouragement /s I think it's great to encourage students like Samarth and I by sharing and talking about what we're building. You can offer specific and helpful feedback which I would really appreciate. But I don't appreciate your calling my work bullshit. And I think this attitude chases away less privileged students from pursuing things like software further. There's value in making something that people get joy from, even if it's not the cutting edge shit that OpenAI blogs about. And I'm confident in what I made here.
  - rgawdzik 7y ago
    welcome to HN -_-: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
  - msla 7y ago
    The comment wasn't about you, it was about articles written by people who want to try very hard to Be Encouraging, an affliction which inhibits adults from seeing children and, in advanced cases, minorities, as people, instead of Things Which Need Encouragement. The end result is articles which are incapable of talking about the achievements, and instead talk about the achievers, as if "encouragement" consists of having your life story plastered on the nearest piece of media.
  - colek42 7y ago
    The fact that you have the courage to share your work speaks volumes about your ability to take risks and receive feedback.
  - phazon_dude 7y ago
    They didn't call your work bullshit, they said the article would be bullshit.
bitwize 7y ago
He basically reimplemented Dissociated Press. Credit where it's due, that's more than most 16-year-olds ever manage (though well within the power of a 16-year-old with a strong interest in programming).
aasasd 7y ago
Having lived through the time when ‘official’ lyrics weren't widely available and having thus come upon a bunch of fan attempts at deciphering Kurt Cobain's songs, complete with advanced cases of Looking for Deep Meaning syndrome, I now see no attraction in a mechanistic approach to the phenomenon.
bsmitty5000 7y ago
I'm a bit more impressed with this article. This person posted the project to reddit 14 hours ago [https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/bw6xs7/lyricsrip_generates_fake_lyrics_for_any_artist/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/bw6xs7/lyricsr...] and already here's this professional looking write up generating additional clicks...really makes me wonder how much residual income a site like reddit creates. Reminds me of remora fish somehow..
BlackJack 7y ago
This is awesome, very cool! You mentioned OpenAI in another post - it's not that hard to use the GPT-2 model. Check out https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple for a quickstart. Would be curious to see how the music generation goes if you re-train your data set against gpt-2.
- lostmsu 7y ago
  There's a version of that I posted just above in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20086483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20086483
WCityMike 7y ago
"Weird Al" Yankovic ... "DOCTYPE HTML / if lt IE 7 / html class no js IE6 oldie!" That polka lyric jams.
llamathrowaway 7y ago
Some meta: The cynic inside me thinks that people’s negative responses here are not really about corrupt media (tm). They are just reflections of the contrarian attitude that runs rampant on this site. The fact the HN guideline has to explicitly forbid 'shallow dismissal' tells you how much compulsive negativity is happening on this site. (And yes, this post is also a display of my own negativity.) I am not defending the media in any way. This is low quality journalism (on a site that does not seem journalistic anyway). The achievement of the 16-yo in the story is not outstanding in this field. HOWEVER, instead of reading yet another comment saying 'meh Markov chain', I guess I’ll prefer something like more advanced materials on text synthesis, some related projects, or just some advice for the author would be nice.
ykevinator 7y ago
Pop music is already pretty algorithic
tiredneurons 7y ago
there is nothing new in that , even a simple rnn can recite lyrics that good. But given that it was built by a "teen" it is good. media people are obsessed with highlighting teenagers anyway.

65 points by amasad 7y ago

This seems to generate mostly word salad. I haven't been able to find an artist (even one of the recommended artists like Drake) that it generates intelligible lyrics for. It seems to grab existing lyrics from other songs and mash them together, but it's not doing a great job of it.

blu3r4d0n 7y ago
Yeah, it just strings words together as far as I can tell.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  He says he used Markov Chains - which is just stringing words together based upon probability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain
vonseel 7y ago
Markov chains alone aren’t really the best solution for this, but you can find a few interesting snippets here and there in the output
notus 7y ago
The only reason this is on HN is because a teenager made it
- rchaud 7y ago
  and so that HN'ers could heap scorn upon it while claiming that they could bang something out like this in a weekend. In this case though, I'd believe them.

gdcohen 7y ago

Brilliant. But doesn't quite work with older generation artists! A snippet from Elvis: "Just you in the time for it's just a rabbit Let's rock Happiness will"

lone_haxx0r 7y ago

Nothing special. Just good ol' Markov chains.

gdcohen 7y ago
Maybe nothing special, but pretty well executed by a teen!
- curiousgal 7y ago
  I mean with the plethora of ressources available today, anything done by a teen today is not as impressive as something done by a teen say 10 or even 5 years ago.
  - damck 7y ago
    That's a really sad way of looking at things
    - curiousgal 7y ago
      Why is that?
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - PavlovsCat 7y ago
      It's not a "way of looking at things", it's a statement. A statement cannot be sad, and even if a statement makes someone sad, that doesn't make it false. edit: yeah, figures. When calling out ElsaGate, I got replies like "your argument is literally 'think of the children'". But in this thread it's all so heartwarming, or respectively turning statements that aren't dripping with soppy general statements that mean nothing into an "attitude" or "way of looking at things" (which remains BS, and reaching 500 karma and finding the downvote button doesn't make that false, either)
  - Bakary 7y ago
    As someone who didn't do much of note during his youth this is still impressive to me and I'm happy to encourage the author if I ever meet them.

JakeStone 7y ago

My current "flow" music is the Hamilton musical, so I threw in Lin-Manuel Miranda into it. The entire result was hot garbage. However, there were buried segments that were good, but I'd have to lay that on the tightness of Mr. Miranda's lyrics as we're dealing with Markov chains. All in all, that was a few minutes of amusement.

lostmsu 7y ago

Here's one, that uses OpenAI's GPT-2 to generate: http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/ http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/ Partial write-up: https://habr.com/post/453232/ https://habr.com/post/453232/ Took about 2 weeks to make, most on the website part. So if you want to teach your kid programming and some AI, it's not so hard.

JakeStone 7y ago
That was interesting, and if it had been an actual song (with a little bit of cleanup) would have made for interesting interpretation, depending how it was approached by music and singer. Then you get something like this: http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/song/3971156712 http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/song/3971156712 :D
- lostmsu 7y ago
  I believe you can co-write music too. My original plan for expanding the project was to train on MIDI-karaoke files, and folks from OpenAI recenlty proved that actually works for MIDI with no text: https://openai.com/blog/musenet/ https://openai.com/blog/musenet/

OldSchoolJohnny 7y ago

There should be a life rule, if the word "teen" or "child" appears in any headline about some new "invention" or "app" you should immediately ignore that article as it's going to be some breathless gushing bullshit.

thesephist 7y ago
Thanks for that encouragement /s I think it's great to encourage students like Samarth and I by sharing and talking about what we're building. You can offer specific and helpful feedback which I would really appreciate. But I don't appreciate your calling my work bullshit. And I think this attitude chases away less privileged students from pursuing things like software further. There's value in making something that people get joy from, even if it's not the cutting edge shit that OpenAI blogs about. And I'm confident in what I made here.
- rgawdzik 7y ago
  welcome to HN -_-: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863
- msla 7y ago
  The comment wasn't about you, it was about articles written by people who want to try very hard to Be Encouraging, an affliction which inhibits adults from seeing children and, in advanced cases, minorities, as people, instead of Things Which Need Encouragement. The end result is articles which are incapable of talking about the achievements, and instead talk about the achievers, as if "encouragement" consists of having your life story plastered on the nearest piece of media.
- colek42 7y ago
  The fact that you have the courage to share your work speaks volumes about your ability to take risks and receive feedback.
- phazon_dude 7y ago
  They didn't call your work bullshit, they said the article would be bullshit.

bitwize 7y ago

He basically reimplemented Dissociated Press. Credit where it's due, that's more than most 16-year-olds ever manage (though well within the power of a 16-year-old with a strong interest in programming).

aasasd 7y ago

Having lived through the time when ‘official’ lyrics weren't widely available and having thus come upon a bunch of fan attempts at deciphering Kurt Cobain's songs, complete with advanced cases of Looking for Deep Meaning syndrome, I now see no attraction in a mechanistic approach to the phenomenon.

bsmitty5000 7y ago

I'm a bit more impressed with this article. This person posted the project to reddit 14 hours ago [https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/bw6xs7/lyricsrip_generates_fake_lyrics_for_any_artist/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/bw6xs7/lyricsr...] and already here's this professional looking write up generating additional clicks...really makes me wonder how much residual income a site like reddit creates. Reminds me of remora fish somehow..

BlackJack 7y ago

This is awesome, very cool! You mentioned OpenAI in another post - it's not that hard to use the GPT-2 model. Check out https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple for a quickstart. Would be curious to see how the music generation goes if you re-train your data set against gpt-2.

lostmsu 7y ago
There's a version of that I posted just above in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20086483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20086483

WCityMike 7y ago

"Weird Al" Yankovic ... "DOCTYPE HTML / if lt IE 7 / html class no js IE6 oldie!" That polka lyric jams.

llamathrowaway 7y ago

Some meta: The cynic inside me thinks that people’s negative responses here are not really about corrupt media (tm). They are just reflections of the contrarian attitude that runs rampant on this site. The fact the HN guideline has to explicitly forbid 'shallow dismissal' tells you how much compulsive negativity is happening on this site. (And yes, this post is also a display of my own negativity.) I am not defending the media in any way. This is low quality journalism (on a site that does not seem journalistic anyway). The achievement of the 16-yo in the story is not outstanding in this field. HOWEVER, instead of reading yet another comment saying 'meh Markov chain', I guess I’ll prefer something like more advanced materials on text synthesis, some related projects, or just some advice for the author would be nice.

ykevinator 7y ago

Pop music is already pretty algorithic

tiredneurons 7y ago

there is nothing new in that , even a simple rnn can recite lyrics that good. But given that it was built by a "teen" it is good. media people are obsessed with highlighting teenagers anyway.