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Google AI generates musical backing tracks to accompany singers

An artificial intelligence called SingSong can take a recording of a person singing and create a backing track for it with the appropriate rhythm, key and harmonies

By Matthew Sparkes

2 February 2023

A woman singing while standing on a couch

Google AI SingSong could one day provide a backing track for your solo masterpieces

Hello World/Getty Images

Google has trained an artificial intelligence, named SingSong, that can generate a musical backing track to accompany people’s recorded singing.

To develop it, Jesse Engel and his colleagues at Google Research used an algorithm to separate the instrumental and vocal parts from 46,000 hours of music and then fine-tuned an existing AI model – also created by Google Research, but for generating speech and piano music – on those pairs of recordings.

After that training, the adapted AI …

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