600 years ago King Sejong the Great of Korea published ‘Hangul’, a new and improved writing system for his people. To celebrate he asked his court scholars to write an epic poem in Hangul, then asked his musicians to compose music to accompany it. The result was Yongbieocheonga, or ‘Songs of the Dragon Flying to Heaven’.
It was performed by musicians playing wind and stringed instruments. Each instrument had its own melody written out for the musician to follow. Only one piece of the written music survives fully intact (it is still performed!). Melodies of other pieces of music have survived but only for a single instrument. That means those pieces can’t be played by a group of musicians because all the other harmonies are missing.
A team of computer scientists decided to recreate the missing 15th century Korean harmonies from just the single melodies (in the way the Bach Google Doodle does, see You’ll Be Bach!). They wanted to expand the ability of their AI tools to make sense of music beyond western music.
They first taught their AI musician to recognise Korean music written in Hangul. Then, it learnt which notes sound best played together by different instruments. Finally, to generate music that could be played, it matched melodies and rhythms.
It created a melody for each different instrument. The researchers then asked Korean musicians to perform the whole piece and to judge how well the AI musician had done. Happily, they thought that the music worked well and sounded correct. They could perform it with only a few small tweaks.
You can listen to one of the performances and find out more below.
Jo Brodie and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London
More on…
The musical instruments the AI composed for are Daegeum and Piri (wind instruments), Haegeum and Ajaeng (bowed string instruments) and Geomungo and Gayageum (plucked string instruments).
You can hear what a piri sounds like in this short YouTube video (in Korean with English subtitles) [EXTERNAL]
You can listen to and watch a performance of the music too [EXTERNAL]
We have LOTS of articles about music, audio and computer science. Have a look in these themed portals for more:
- Music and AI
- Music, Digital or Not
- Audio Engineering
- Read more about Music and AI in our mini-magazine “A Bit of CS4FN” issue 6 [COMING SOON]
Getting technical…
- Six Dragons Fly Again: Reviving 15th-Century Korean Court Music with Transformers and Novel Encoding (2024) by Danbinaerin Han, Mark Gotham, Dongmin Kim, Hannah Park, Sihun Lee, Dasaem Jeong [EXTERNAL]
- Six Dragons Fly Again for Web – interactive web demo [EXTERNAL]
- Six Dragons Fly Again for Web, 2024 (2024) – more information [EXTERNAL]
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