MOSCOW, May 23. /TASS/. Russian opera singer Vera Kononova has become the world’s first artist to perform a duet with artificial intelligence, a TASS correspondent reported.
The singer teamed up with the AI to sing several songs, including a number from Andew Lloyd Webber’s musical The Phantom of the Opera, at Moscow’s Recording House as part of a musical and scientific experiment.
"Music made by neural networks is the music of the future. If we were able to create scores for orchestras using neural networks, we could open a world of creative possibilities and invent countless new melodies," Kononova, who was behind the endeavour, told TASS.
The AI sang the Phantom's vocals, and Kononova accompanied it. According to the artist, this experiment gave Andrew Lloyd Webber’s music an innovative, new sound. "We generated the Phantom’s voice and gave the duet a shot. The difficulty is that the live orchestra and I, an opera singer, need to stay in sync with the AI voice," she explained.
The vocals for the Phantom were developed by Chinese composer Duan Yuqian. She used state of the art neuronet technologies to create a voice capable of performing with human singers.
"It was difficult to work with the neural network because the way it perceives information is different from humans, and when I set a task before it, we don’t always understand each other," the composer told TASS. "I spent a lot of time teaching the neural network to do what I want, and I did it," Duan added.
Today, Kononova and her AI partner performed before a small group of journalists, while the general public will be able to enjoy their performance at the Moscow International House of Music on June 11.