As vocal clones of music’s biggest names go viral, the Financial Times’ pop critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney embarked on an unlikely quest to replicate his favourite singer’s voice.
Like a turkey dozing off when talk turns to Christmas, I confess to tuning out when talk turns to AI. Or rather I used to, until a few weeks ago. Before then, AI seemed vital and foreboding, yet somehow also remote and incomprehensible. But now my attention is hooked. The difference lies in the no-longer-unique sound of the human voice.
In April, a track called Heart On My Sleeve became the first voice-clone hit, notching up millions of streams and views. Purportedly made by a mysterious figure called Ghostwriter, it’s a duet featuring AI-generated versions of Canadian superstars Drake and The Weeknd. Aside from my being a fan, a reason to pick him is his distinctive singing style, a cataract roar to rival Niagara Falls. Another is the frustrating absence of any new music from him: His most recent album came out in 2011. I therefore set myself the challenge of using online generative tools to create a surrogate for the real thing, a new song that will endeavour to put the AI into Tom Waits.
“It was a novelty, no one had seen it,” he said of the AI-generated Ye voice. “Like, the tutorial had about 20 views on YouTube. And I looked at it and went, ‘Oh my God.’ The reason I knew it was going to be huge wasn’t just that it was novel and cool, but also because the copyright conversation around it is going to change everything.”are also raised by voice cloning. Nickson, who isn’t African-American, was criticised online for using a black American voice.
Because the tech is quite new, there’s a lot of people working on it and trying to get a product out. He won’t put an exact figure on his earnings but his laugh carries a disbelieving note when I ask. “It’s a lot,” he said, with a smile shading from bashful to gleeful.I go to another site to extract a cappella sound files of Waits singing tracks from his album Rain Dogs, which I then feed into Voicify.ai. Several hours later, my AI Waits is ready. I test it with Abba’s Dancing Queen, an MP3 of which I drag-and-drop into the website.
“If we do get a court case, it will come to whether you’re trying to make money from it, or is it a viral parody that you’re doing for legitimate purposes?” reckoned Dr Luke McDonagh of the London School of Economics, an expert on intellectual property rights and the arts. “If you’re doing it to make money, then the law will stop you because you’re essentially free-riding on the brand image, the voice of someone else’s personality.
My additions to Boomy’s immense pile of songs are undistinguished. To create a track, you pick a style, such as “lo-fi” or “global groove”, and then set basic parameters, like the drum sound and tempo. There isn’t an option to select the style of a named artist. After fiddling with it to make the music as jazzy as possible, I end up with an odd beat-driven thing with a twangy bass.
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