Neurona
Neurona is a daughter of my first NN text-generation project Neural Defence. After a success with the automated generation of Russian poetry we with a friend of mine, Ivan Yamshchikov, decided to focus on the English version of the same architecture.
We harvested ~200Mb of lyrics of classical and modern poetry in English across the web and tried to use this dataset for learning, but the quality of online poetry was so poor so we several weeks on data cleaning. After a profound filtering, we got ~100 Mb of data that was used to train a language model with hybrid embeddings (check my previous post on Neural Defence project for some more details). Using the trained model we generated a lot of lyrics, filtered it and finally got four songs.
Again Ivan wrote and played all the music on the album, but this time we decided to invite a professional singer: after several tries with some Russian singers we broadened our search so eventually, a New-York singer Rob Carrol recorded vocals for all four songs.
To give some additional old-school touch to the whole project, we have taken an original tape with Nirvana recordings and recorded the EP over it. You can listen to the whole EP on Apple Music or Google Music. We also thought that every EP needs a clip, so we made one:
Finally, our EP was chosen as an entry for NIPS4Creativity Workshop Art Gallery 2017— here it is, the last entry.
To get more details on this project you could check this Ivan’s medium post or read slides from our talk on neural network poetry generation on Berlin Machine Learning meetup.
