Page 135 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim┊Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 8

ai and musical interpretation
ing both Drake and The Weeknd. Yet the AI coup had already created a
8
huge media echo. Joe Coscarelli called the episode in the New York Times
“a harbinger of the headaches that can occur when a new technology cross-
es over into the mainstream consciousness of creators and consumers before
9
the necessary rules are in place.” By now many corporations have engaged
in the creation of AI versions of current singers’ voices in order to present
songs that those vocalists have never recorded. Google actually released
“Dream Track”, a system creating songs which imitate the voices of nine
well-known singers including Demi Lovato, Jon Legend, Charlie Puth and
others. All nine singers have agreed to their voices being used as part of this
“experimental AI tool”. Apart from the voices Dream Track also provides
“a stylistically relevant backing track.” 10
All the examples mentioned thus far relate to singers currently active.
They are by and large better known and have a larger fan base, so that the
option to make money is greater. It is also easier to explain the emergence
of a new song recorded by a singer who is still active. Yet AI has also been
used to recreate the voices of much earlier famous vocalists. Hence we can
now hear Frank Sinatra singing songs that he actually never recorded. One
of them is “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the most successful track from Nirva-
na’s 1991 album Nevermind. Frank Sinatra was still alive when the Nirva-
11
na song was released (he died in 1998), yet never recorded it himself. In the
AI version Nirvana’s alternative rock style is replaced by a big band back-
ing, while converting Kurt Cobain’s grunge style and voice colour to Sina-
tra’s colour and crooning style. Getting both voice colour and singing style
right is quite a challenge, and different recreations of voices can be more or
less successful in that respect. AI Music World, the YouTube channel fea-
turing Sinatra’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, offers many other AI-generated
8 See, for example: Eli Glastner, “AI-generated Drake/Weeknd Deep Fake Song Rattles
Music Industry,” CBC News: The National, uploaded on 21 April 2023, YouTube vid-
eo, 2:20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COok3YO1L5w.
9 Joe Coscarelli, “An A.I. Hit of Fake ‘Drake’ and ‘The Weeknd’ Rattles the Music
World,” The New York Times, April 24, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/
arts/music/ai-drake-the-weeknd-fake.html.
10 Chloe Veltman, “Google’s Latest AI Music Tool Creates Track Using Famous Singers’
Voice Clones,” NPR, November 17, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213551049/
googles-latest-ai-music-tool-creates-tracks-using-famous-singers-voice-clones.
11 “Frank Sinatra – Smells like Teen Spirit (AI Cover),” AI Music World, uploaded on
11 August 2023, YouTube video, 2:40, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Num0q-l-
ldc. The original Nirvana song can also be found on YouTube: Nirvana, “Nirvana –
Smells Like Teen Spirit (Official Music Video),” uploaded 16 June 2009, YouTube vid-
eo, 4:38, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTWKbfoikeg.

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