The AI ​​project "Amadeus Code" proves how easy it can be to write a radio-friendly piece of pop music. Using data from countless pop songs, it creates new music - and that sounds really good.

If you want to make it to the top of the music business and stay there for a long time, you need talent, assertiveness, charisma - and a knack for good songs. The fact that you do not necessarily have to be kissed by the muse for a few veritable and easily digestible hits soon becomes clear when you turn on the radio. Here, many songs somehow sound the same and this is no coincidence, because pop music often follows certain schemes and compositional tricks that are used again and again. This is what the creators of the AI ​​project "Amadeus Code" take advantage of, reported by " Tech Crunch ". And the result sounds amazing - or terrifying - good.

Behind the computer songs of "Amadeus Code" are the Japanese scientists and music experts Jun Inoue, Gyo Kitagawa and Taishi Fukuyama. For their songwriting machine, they have analyzed decades of contemporary songs and classical music and pieces of great economic or social significance, and fed "Amadeus Code" with this data. The result is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that specializes in composing appealing melodies. "Amadeus Code" can do even more: On Youtube, the makers show a song composed by "Amadeus Code", once as a raw file with MIDI sounds and once as a "real" version , played by real people with instruments.

"Amadeus Code" should inspire
The result sounds really good - evil tongues already see a real competition to indie bands like Mumford & Sons or German pop singers like Mark Forster, Max Giesinger, Tim Bendzko and Co. But "Amadeus Code" is not about conquer the charts with robotic songs - at least not directly, Jun Inoue explains. The tool, which incidentally also exists as an app for iOS devices , is rather intended as a source of inspiration for professional musicians, who are still missing the idea in their search for the next million-dollar melody. Over detours the compositions of "Amadeus Code" could end up in the charts. Nobody would notice.

However, Inoue does not believe that KI will eventually replace the right big stars: "The AI ​​does not talk about the inner and outer struggles and difficulties that people experience, these real, human stories make music." We see AI as another creative tool just like samplers or drum machines that allow artists to push the boundaries of pop music. "

By the way: How the mechanisms of the pop business work, other artists have already revealed. In the book "The KLF - The Handbook - the fast way to the number one hit", the musicians behind the KLF project in 1988 explained how easy it is to get on the charts. Satirist Jan Böhmermann billed German pop stars such as Max Giesinger and Tim Bendzko in 2017 and proved with the song "Menschen Leben Tanzen Welt" how easy it is to produce a radio hit - the lines of text consist of advertising slogans, calendar quotes and excerpts German pop songs, they have chimpanzees from the Gelsenkirchen Zoo.