Listen: AC/DC song 'Great Balls' created using artificial intelligence
This is staggeringly good!
A YouTube user who goes by the curious name of Funk Turkey has created a surprisingly brilliant spoof AC/DC song called ‘Great Balls’ using artificial intelligence.
The Arkansas native created the lyrics for ‘Great Balls’ by using a website called lyrics.rip, which scours the back catalogues of musicians and uses a ‘Markov chain’ to randomly reorder lyrics together to create new songs.
The enigmatic Funk Turkey then added music to these randomised words – seemingly heavily nodding towards AC/DC’s seminal 1981 anthem For Those About to Rock (We Salute You) – before finishing it off with a Brian Johnson-esque vocals. The results are incredible.
Introducing the video, Funk Turkey wrote: “Using lyrics.rip to scrape the Genius Lyrics Database, I made a Markov Chain write AC/DC lyrics. This is the end result- "Great Balls". Also let me say that trying to sing like Brian Johnson is extremely hard…
Listen to AI/DC’s ‘Great Balls’:
Explaining in more detail how he created Great Balls, Funk Turkey wrote on Reddit: “I used a markov chain that will spit out a batch of lyrics that are scraped from the Genius API. sometimes it's somewhat cohesive, sometimes it's not. I'll go through multiple iterations to find something that resembles a hook and start with that. Sometimes it's in decent order, sometimes it's all wonky. I try to keep things in the order that they come out but for the sake of making the song more pleasant I might have to move one line here or there.
“From there, I fill in the choruses with lines that have been generated from other iterations that might tell some kind of cohesive story, or at least seem to in crazy Markov Chain word salad.
“I've heard some AI generated music and it always seems to go off the rails, so I instead try to write a song structure that is similar to the style of the artist that the lyrics are based on. I then perform that song (all instruments) and try to imitate the vocals as closely as I possibly can. I try to stick with common tropes that artist might employ- for example, Angus usually employs really bluesy licks in a minor or major pentatonic scale, so I made sure to get that. Malcolm has a VERY distinctive rhythm guitar style so I emulated him as much as possible. Etc.
“BRIAN JOHNSON'S VOCALS ARE SO HARD TO MIMIC. By the time I was done, my throat was in ribbons.”
‘Great Balls’ isn’t the first spoof song Funk Turkey created using artificial intelligence. At the end of April he shared ‘Nobody Died Every Single Day’ by Nickelbot. Listen to that here:
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