
A Teen Programmer Built a Tool to Generate Fake Lyrics for Your Favorite Artists - amasad
https://genius.com/a/a-teen-programmer-built-a-tool-called-lyrics-rip-to-generate-fake-lyrics-for-your-favorite-artists
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bsmitty5000
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...](https://www.reddit.com/r/hiphopheads/comments/bw6xs7/lyricsrip_generates_fake_lyrics_for_any_artist/)]
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..

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aesthetics1
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.

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notus
The only reason this is on HN is because a teenager made it

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rchaud
and so that HN'ers could heap scorn upon it while claiming that they could
bang something out like this in a weekend.

In this case though, I'd believe them.

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lostmsu
Here's one, that uses OpenAI's GPT-2 to generate:
[http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/](http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/)

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

~~~
JakeStone
That was interesting, and if it had been an actual song (with a little bit of
cleanup) would have made for interesting interpretation, depending how it was
approached by music and singer.

Then you get something like _this_ :
[http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/song/3971156712](http://billion.dev.losttech.software:2095/song/3971156712)

:D

~~~
lostmsu
I believe you can co-write music too. My original plan for expanding the
project was to train on MIDI-karaoke files, and folks from OpenAI recenlty
proved that actually works for MIDI with no text:
[https://openai.com/blog/musenet/](https://openai.com/blog/musenet/)

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aasasd
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.

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lone_haxx0r
Nothing special. Just good ol' Markov chains.

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gdcohen
Maybe nothing special, but pretty well executed by a teen!

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curiousgal
I mean with the plethora of ressources available today, anything done by a
teen today is not as impressive as something done by a teen say 10 or even 5
years ago.

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damck
That's a really sad way of looking at things

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curiousgal
Why is that?

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JakeStone
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.

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BlackJack
This is awesome, very cool! You mentioned OpenAI in another post - it's not
that hard to use the GPT-2 model. Check out
[https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple](https://github.com/minimaxir/gpt-2-simple)
for a quickstart. Would be curious to see how the music generation goes if you
re-train your data set against gpt-2.

~~~
lostmsu
There's a version of that I posted just above in this thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20086483](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20086483)

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gdcohen
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"

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llamathrowaway
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.

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bitwize
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).

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WCityMike
"Weird Al" Yankovic ...

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

That polka lyric jams.

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ykevinator
Pop music is already pretty algorithic

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tiredneurons
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.

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OldSchoolJohnny
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
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.

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phazon_dude
They didn't call your work bullshit, they said the article would be bullshit.

~~~
bartread
Weeeell... strictly, yes, but actually I'm inclined to think not. The tone was
sweeping, not to mention disrespectful, enough that I think a broader
interpretation is warranted. By claiming such articles are only worthy of
being ignored the implication is clearly that the object(s) of such articles
are also unworthy of interest.

