‘A Human Concerto’ features AI humanoids that can sing in six octaves, far more than a human singer’s vocal range
Do you remember how in 2017 two artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots on Facebook allegedly invented a secret language to talk to each other? It led to a plethora of speculations at that time about if AI is finally becoming sentient. Six years later, these discussions still feel very relevant.
In his latest multimedia musical production A Human Concerto—which runs from September 15 to 17—Hong Kong media artist Keith Leung, who goes by the name GayBird, explores these very questions. He does this through an onstage interaction between three human performers—an actor, a musician and himself—and eight AI humanoid installations, which appear in the form of projected human heads.
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GayBird created these avatar heads with Unreal Engine MetaHuman, a cloud-based AI app that generates animated versions of photorealistic digital humans—complete with natural facial expressions—that can sing in vocal ranges beyond human capacity. The artist then used the Sovits AI software to create the humanoids’ voices, and text-to-speech software and ChatGPT to create the lyrics and songs.
“In my production, sometimes the actor will have a dialogue with the AI human heads; sometimes the musician and I will play music and the AI humans will sing together,” he says. “Each show will be different [depending on how the live interactions turn out].”
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