New technology provides inspiration for song lyrics

Music artists can find new creative directions for their songwriting with a real-time system that uses artificial intelligence.

LyricJam was created by members of the University’s Natural Language Processing Lab led by Olga Vechtomova, a Waterloo Engineering professor cross-appointed in Computer Science.

The lab’s initial work led to the creation of a system that learns musical expressions of artists and generates lyrics in their style.

Recently, Vechtomova and her team developed technology that relies on various aspects of music such as chord progressions, tempo and instrumentation to synthesize lyrics reflecting the mood and emotions expressed by live music.

As a musician or a band plays instrumental music, the system continuously receives the raw audio clips, which the neural network processes to generate new lyric lines. The artists can then use the lines to compose their own song lyrics.

Read Researchers develop real-time lyric generation technology to inspire song writing for full story.