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Yaboi Hanoi is a cultural technologist and AI research scientist based in Bangkok + Shanghai. He was the winner of the AI Song Contest 2022 and an ex-Google AI Resident.
@yaboihanoi
Karina Zavidova
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In this Guide, ลำธาร หาญตระกูล (Lamtharn Hantrakul) aka Yaboi Hanoi tells us about the long-standing relationship between music and technology focusing on recent AI-powered twists and turns. Combining his AI research experience and artistic practice, he will be covering how AI is applied to the music making process, the differences between symbolic-based and audio-based AI, current state-of-the-art tools you can try yourself, and the need for transcultural AI.
This Guide is a part of our community program AI Playground S01 / Sound. AI Playground is an event series and a collection of Guides, structured under four topics: Image, Text, Body and Sound. As part of the program we hosted 2 events exploring AI in relation to music and sound (full recordings can be found on our YouTube channel):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDeWSa_03HU&t=46s&ab_channel=AIxDesignCommunity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veSP7j9BzdM&ab_channel=AIxDesignCommunity
สวัสดีครับ - Sawasdeekrub! That’s hello in Thai 😀 I’m ลำธาร หาญตระกูล or Lamtharn Hantrakul, better known by my artist name Yaboi Hanoi!
I’m the winner of the recent AI Song Contest 2022 and am excited to be sharing my technical and musical experience in this AI Sound Guide with you. This guide is intended for anyone interested in how AI is being applied to sound; specifically generating music. We will cover key developments in research, dive into music AI tools you can try right now and look into what musicians are doing with this technology.
I’m one of the original co-inventors of the DDSP library and Tone Transfer experience from the Magenta team at Google Brain, and develop music AI tools like Mawf as an AI Research Scientist in the Speech Audio and Music Intelligence (SAMI) team at ByteDance/TikTok R&D. I have degrees in both Physics and Music from Yale University, a Music Technology MS from Georgia Tech and continue to compose music professionally using AI-powered audio synthesis techniques. My winning piece for the AI Song Contest 2022, entitled “อสุระเทวะชุมนุม - Enter Demons and Gods”, demonstrated how modern AI can be used to empower melodies and tuning systems from Southeast Asia like never before.
In this guide, I’ll be telling the story of Music AI from a joint perspective of music, technology and culture - pointing out where these system can empower and fail in terms of cultural bias, and what we can do as musicians, researchers and listeners of music to address these issues together.
*Note: this guide does not represent the views of my current or previous employers, collaborators nor team members. It is based solely on my personal opinions and perspectives as a practitioner in the field.