Researchers have created an artificial intelligence (AI) that could spell the future of the Christmas No. 1. The AI is able to create computer-generated sing-along based only on a festive digital photo.

    Dubbed “neural karaoke,” the software writes its own simple composition and also provides on-screen lyrics for any budding singers to join in. As well as composing and singing a Christmas song, the AI was also able to produce a dancing stick man to move along to the music.

    Researchers at the University of Toronto trained the AI using 100 hours of online music. The software was able to take what it had learned to produce a 120-beats-per-minute melody based on a musical scale and melodic profile. It can then add chords and drums to its composition.

    The song generator built up a vocabulary of 3,390 words, using words that appeared at least four times on the training music. The software was able to string these words together into lyrics at a rate of one word per beat.

    After perfecting the music generator, the researchers also taught the software how to dance. The AI was trained with an hour’s worth of footage from the video game “Just Dance.” By tracking the movements, the AI was able to produce a digital stick figure that can dance along to the music.

    Once the singing and dancing was perfected, the AI was fed with images and their captions in order to learn how words are linked to certain visuals. This enabled the software to come up with suitable lyrics.

    (SD-Agencies)