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A Teen Programmer Built a Tool to Generate Fake Lyrics for Your Favorite Artists

65 points| amasad | 6 years ago |genius.com

48 comments

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[+] bsmitty5000|6 years ago|reply
I'm a bit more impressed with this article. This person posted the project to reddit 14 hours ago [https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/bw6xs7/lyricsr...] and already here's this professional looking write up generating additional clicks...really makes me wonder how much residual income a site like reddit creates. Reminds me of remora fish somehow..
[+] aesthetics1|6 years ago|reply
This seems to generate mostly word salad. I haven't been able to find an artist (even one of the recommended artists like Drake) that it generates intelligible lyrics for. It seems to grab existing lyrics from other songs and mash them together, but it's not doing a great job of it.
[+] notus|6 years ago|reply
The only reason this is on HN is because a teenager made it
[+] vonseel|6 years ago|reply
Markov chains alone aren’t really the best solution for this, but you can find a few interesting snippets here and there in the output
[+] blu3r4d0n|6 years ago|reply
Yeah, it just strings words together as far as I can tell.
[+] lostmsu|6 years ago|reply
Here's one, that uses OpenAI's GPT-2 to generate: http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/

Partial write-up: https://habr.com/post/453232/

Took about 2 weeks to make, most on the website part. So if you want to teach your kid programming and some AI, it's not so hard.

[+] aasasd|6 years ago|reply
Having lived through the time when ‘official’ lyrics weren't widely available and having thus come upon a bunch of fan attempts at deciphering Kurt Cobain's songs, complete with advanced cases of Looking for Deep Meaning syndrome, I now see no attraction in a mechanistic approach to the phenomenon.
[+] lone_haxx0r|6 years ago|reply
Nothing special. Just good ol' Markov chains.
[+] gdcohen|6 years ago|reply
Maybe nothing special, but pretty well executed by a teen!
[+] JakeStone|6 years ago|reply
My current "flow" music is the Hamilton musical, so I threw in Lin-Manuel Miranda into it.

The entire result was hot garbage.

However, there were buried segments that were good, but I'd have to lay that on the tightness of Mr. Miranda's lyrics as we're dealing with Markov chains.

All in all, that was a few minutes of amusement.

[+] gdcohen|6 years ago|reply
Brilliant. But doesn't quite work with older generation artists! A snippet from Elvis:

"Just you in the time for it's just a rabbit

Let's rock

Happiness will"

[+] llamathrowaway|6 years ago|reply
Some meta:

The cynic inside me thinks that people’s negative responses here are not really about corrupt media (tm). They are just reflections of the contrarian attitude that runs rampant on this site. The fact the HN guideline has to explicitly forbid 'shallow dismissal' tells you how much compulsive negativity is happening on this site.

(And yes, this post is also a display of my own negativity.)

I am not defending the media in any way. This is low quality journalism (on a site that does not seem journalistic anyway). The achievement of the 16-yo in the story is not outstanding in this field. HOWEVER, instead of reading yet another comment saying 'meh Markov chain', I guess I’ll prefer something like more advanced materials on text synthesis, some related projects, or just some advice for the author would be nice.

[+] bitwize|6 years ago|reply
He basically reimplemented Dissociated Press.

Credit where it's due, that's more than most 16-year-olds ever manage (though well within the power of a 16-year-old with a strong interest in programming).

[+] WCityMike|6 years ago|reply
"Weird Al" Yankovic ...

"DOCTYPE HTML / if lt IE 7 / html class no js IE6 oldie!"

That polka lyric jams.

[+] ykevinator|6 years ago|reply
Pop music is already pretty algorithic
[+] tiredneurons|6 years ago|reply
there is nothing new in that , even a simple rnn can recite lyrics that good. But given that it was built by a "teen" it is good. media people are obsessed with highlighting teenagers anyway.
[+] OldSchoolJohnny|6 years ago|reply
There should be a life rule, if the word "teen" or "child" appears in any headline about some new "invention" or "app" you should immediately ignore that article as it's going to be some breathless gushing bullshit.
[+] thesephist|6 years ago|reply
Thanks for that encouragement /s

I think it's great to encourage students like Samarth and I by sharing and talking about what we're building. You can offer specific and helpful feedback which I would really appreciate. But I don't appreciate your calling my work bullshit. And I think this attitude chases away less privileged students from pursuing things like software further. There's value in making something that people get joy from, even if it's not the cutting edge shit that OpenAI blogs about. And I'm confident in what I made here.

[+] TylerE|6 years ago|reply
Yeah I was expecting something actually interesting - but nope, markov chains.
[+] rchaud|6 years ago|reply
Except if they're well-heeled American dropouts at an elite school. Then the world is their oyster.