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UNDERGROUND
A Tribute to Metallica's Kill'Em All Phase
Music by Overdrive
Check out the IG promo video:
https://www.instagram.com/p/C2AFHGkOJG7/
This is an original track inspired by Metallica's Kill'Em All phase, which features James Hetfield's AI-generated vocals. It's a non-commercial/experimental track made as a tribute to the band and created under the fair use permission of copyright statute.
The use of AI-generated vocals is still a source of much controversy and heated discussion. I've been following the issue closely since the beginning of 2023, when French DJ David Guetta replicated the voice of American rapper Eminem during a concert, causing a wave of immense buzz about it.
Also in early 2023, the track "Heart on My Sleeve", which used AI-generated vocals from Canadian rappers Drake and The Weeknd, went viral before being taken down by streaming services.
In September, John Lennon's voice was removed from a demo tape recorded in 1978. The poor quality audio was processed with AI for a new Beatles recording, giving rise to the song "Now & Then".
During this period, there was an eruption of websites focused on voice cloning, which, in October 2023, led RIAA to request the inclusion of such websites on the government's piracy watchlist -- and the main target became Vocify.ai.
On the other hand, Aditya Bansal, a 20-year-old UK student who founded Vocify.ai, claims that several record companies have already contacted him wanting to make models of their own artists for demo tracks, "as drafts before the full recording process".
As MusicBusiness rightly pointed out, "major record companies hate AI voice-cloning platforms that don't pay".
I myself have had some very interesting personal experiences on the subject. A demo track of "Underground" was posted on a Discord server dedicated to vocaloids and synthesized vocals. The track was deleted less than 24 hours later by the moderator, who made a point of publicly censoring me on the open channel, stating that he didn't accept what he called "unethical" methods. I tried to explain that it was an experimental track, with no commercial purpose; that it was made as a tribute; that I had also sent the link directly to the band on their official Metallica Instagram, and so on. But the mere act of replying got me summarily kicked off the server.
I honestly believe that merely using tools like Voicify.ai and Kits.ai is not an unethical activity when the aim is to test the potential of a new technology. And the track "Underground" worked exactly as an experiment. It taught me that AI-cloned vocals need a lot of filters on the daw to mask defects derived from the cloning process. It served to show that the quantity of examples provided during the training of the AI is essential for improving the quality of the model. It served to show that training the model is better with vocals recorded in mono than with vocals in stereo; better with vocals recorded dry than recorded with reverb; and so on.
Moreover, I'm particularly happy with the AI-generated commercial voices I already use with Synthesizer V software, so I have no intention of replacing them with cloned voices of famous singers.
Hopefully, this small initiative will at least serve to dispel a little of the immense prejudice that has arisen around a technology that will soon become commonplace in the music industry. Nowadays, no one remembers all the controversy caused by the emergence of radio, when record company managers boasted that no one would buy albums anymore. It's the same story every time a new technology emerges.
Hope you enjoy the track.
TECH TRIVIA
* The guitar solos were assembled from multiple pieces of isolated audios of Kirk Hammett's solos available on YT.
* The rhythm guitars and the bass are Kontakt libraries.
* The original vocals were created in Synthesizer V with NineZero voicebank. The NineZero's isolated audio was then converted into James Hetfield's vocals.
- Genre
- Rock