Most humans can’t sing. But that doesn’t stop them from belting out songs in the shower or whistling a tune in traffic or drunkenly grabbing the mic during karoake. It should. Maybe this machine can shame us. It’s a singing machine that sings love songs from the 90’s with emotion unexpected from a machine.
The way it works, as explained by Martin Backes, the guy who made it, is through DSP (Digital Signal Processing). Backes writes:
The sound is generated by the real time synthesis language called SuperCollider, same for the Visuals, so you have to write code. There’s almost no Audio FX or something like this, it’s basically a sine wave, the most artificial sound.
“What do machines sing of?” is a fully automated machine, which endlessly sings number-one ballads from the 1990s. As the computer program performs these emotionally loaded songs, it attempts to apply the appropriate human sentiments. This behaviour of the device seems to reflect a desire, on the part of the machine, to become sophisticated enough to have its very own personality.