The Pet Shop Boys are thinking of letting artificial intelligence kill their songs.
It all started when the 15-year-old daughter of the Pet Shop Boys manager asked an artificial intelligence to compose a song in the style of the group. In a few minutes, the neural network had already composed and performed a piece that left Neil Tennant and Chris Lowe in awe. While the music industry mobilizes to stop the multiplication of songs that "supplant" or imitate the style of the greatest hits, the British duo opted for the opposite: to ask for help to finish unfinished songs that sleep in the drawer.
The singer Neil Tennant acknowledged in an interview with Radio Times that they are considering finishing a handful of issues that were left without a solution through this type of computer applications: “There's a song we wrote a chorus for in 2003 and we never finished it because I couldn't think of anything for the verses. But now, with the AI, you can give it the bits you've written, push the button, and have it fill in the blanks. Then you could rewrite it, but it could still be a tool."
As they prepare to launch their greatest hits 'Dreamworld' tour in Britain and Europe this summer, the group revealed that they are not shy away from experimenting with these technologies and admitted that the results offered by these types of programs are perfect for solving the problem. "writer's block" to which many creators are habitually condemned. Chris added: "So the answer is, we'll probably use it."
This attitude contrasts with the almost unanimous decision of the industry that, in October, through the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) warned that AI companies were infringing copyright en masse by using music to train their machines and They asked Spotify not to give up their catalogs for learning about these neural networks. In this line was the complaint from Universal Music after an AI generated a song that seemed to be performed by Drake and The Weeknd, "Heart On My Sleeve", which was withdrawn from platforms such as Spotify due to legal doubts. After that song fell several hundred more generated by robots.
By Tennant, it was "quite moving" to watch Abba Voyage, the "virtual residency" show in which the Swedish group was represented by avatars that captured them in their youth. "They were the perfect group for that representation, because their sound was striving for perfection, they were only together for a short time, then they disappeared in a way that no one else has. It wouldn't be the same to do it with, say, The Beatles."
