A YouTube Channel is Streaming AI-Generated Death Metal 24/7

Those who deride technical death metal as riff-salad garbage that could be created by computers just got a boost to their argument from Dadabots, a neural network that’s done exactly that.

The Dadabots YouTube channel has been livestreaming technical death metal created by artificial intelligence 24/7 for the past month. Founded and created by musicians and technologists CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, who met while attending Berklee College of Music in Boston (where else?), the software is fed large amounts of data and then “learns” how to replicate it by processing and internalizing its inherent patterns. The neural network starts small, “studying” a few seconds of music at a time, before graduating to entire albums and eventually a band’s full discography. In this case, the technicians fed their bots a healthy diet of Archspire, as fine an example of technical death metal as there is.

The result: artificially generated music that sounds a whole lot like Archspire, yet isn’t! It’s quite remarkable, really, although the Uncanny Valley effect — in audio form — is definitely present. Hang up your instruments, folks, because the singularity has now arrived and we are all obsolete.

Stream AI Archspire below. You can read more about the Dadabots experiment at Motherboard. Previous projects saw the Dadabots AI recreate music based on the catalogues of Aepoch, Battles and Meshuggah.