Composing ancient Korean music

A cartoon drawing of a dragon in a Chinese style with a yellow body and a red tongue. — Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay

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. 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). 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

Watch…

Hear what a piri sounds like in this short YouTube video (in Korean with English subtitles) [EXTERNAL]
Listen to and watch a performance of the music too [EXTERNAL]

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]

The Music and AI pages are sponsored by the EPSRC (UKRI3024: DA EPSRC university doctoral landscape award additional funding 2025 – Queen Mary University of London).

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Separate your stems

Two cartoon faces, both purple, but the one on the left is a bluer purple and the one on the is a redder purple. Two speech bubbles say "I have more blue" for the bluer purple and "I have more red" for the redder purple. — Image by CS4FN

AI can unmix music and isolate vocals

Purple can be created by mixing together red and blue paint. You can probably tell which of the faces in the image has more blue and which has more red. Does music work the same way?

Your brain can recognise the red and blue in purple while still seeing it as a whole colour. Music is similar. When you listen to a song your ears and brain hear all the sounds at once. The singing, guitars, drums and keyboard parts are mixed together, but you can also focus on the singing, or the keyboards or ….

Computer scientists have gone a step further with Artificial Intelligence. By training AI tools on lots of different songs they have taught them to do “source separation” – unmixing a recorded song back into its separate bits. Those separate bits are called stems. It is like taking purple paint and unmixing it to give blue and red again!

A wide grey vase with two flowers in it (one red, one blue) at opposite ends of the vase with their stems definitely very separated. — Stems adapted from a plant pot image by HASSAN DYB from Pixabay.

“Not that kind of stem!”

Did you know?

Photographer Todd McLellan photographs gadgets he’s carefully taken apart, to show all the pieces (search the web for his “Things Come Apart”). When a piece of music is blended together and an AI separates it again it’s a bit more like trying to un-bake a cake!

Jo Brodie and Paul Curzon, Queen Mary University of London

Jamming with JAM_BOT – an AI musician

A robot with a keyboard stomach playing the keyboard. — Image by CS4FN

Jordan Rudess is a rock keyboard player whose concerts sell out around the world. He works with a team of computer scientists at the MIT Media Labto make his synthesisers do amazing things. Together they created an AI musician called JAM_BOT to play with him on-stage.

Jordan’s bot learnt the different ways he plays by the team giving it lots of his music. It learned about the rhythms and melodies he uses. It could then compose its own versions of his music when prompted.

JAM_BOT AI plays along on-stage

Jordan also trained JAM_BOT to play with him. It could carry on playing music that Jordan had started, or create a backing track to music he was currently playing. Jordan was able to choose how JAM_BOT played with him on stage using the keys on his keyboard.

What happened next?

The resulting concert was a mix of performer and AI with a delighted audience (and computer science team). Afterwards Jordan said “It’s been pretty mind-blowing to create this tech-based version of myself – like looking into a real-time musical mirror.”