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Music Album Covers from AI
Those were the days of collecting cassettes & CDs, exchanging them with friends. Friendships blossomed. In an internet-free world, the only peek into a band was the lyrics and the album cover. The piece of art that stuck with us for ages. We spoke about it. Wondered who the artist was. Did the band do it themselves?
The age of the internet and with it music streaming changed it all. Exploring & discovering music was unprecedented but left a void of friendship, exchanging tracks & album covers. Who really was behind the cover art? What was the concept? Wish we could create it too.
Not as an artist, not as a painter but as coders we today can, and is mind-blowing fun to go back to that world. Here we go…
AI is magic. Let us first explore how by prompting an AI machine one can generate amazing art. We can start with a blank canvas or give it an initial image to start from. Let us take an electric guitar. You would agree this is the best invention of mankind.
Photo by Apolo Photographer on Unsplash
And tell it to render as a watercolor painting. You get the below picture. Basically, give it a plain English text prompt “render me a guitar in watercolor painting style” and the AI machine renders it.
Or maybe as a Minecraft object. Yes, you heard it right. No boundaries to AI imagination. It will understand the text and make this image.
Now let us generate a guitar as a neural network in the spirit of AI
& then as a truly electrifying rock experience.
You get the drift. Now we make it a robot.
How about in Andy Warhol’s pop art form and adding a person alongside it? Here you go…
Boundless creativity with a no-ego machine. You can control style, imagery, objects, etc with mere text prompts. The AI learning engine basically ensures an image is generated that matches the text description. The image prompt (ex: electric guitar) is optional.
Here is a collage to see them all at once
With the machine all set up let us go back to the world of music albums. The albums we grew up with are like Black Sabbath’s Black Sabbath. Iconic it was & left everyone wondering what the imagery stood for.
Source:Discogs.com
What could be a cover for this? Let us give our AI engine a blank canvas (no image prompt) and give it the name of the album “Black Sabbath”. This is what we get.
Intense guitaring was key in the album “Headless Cross” by Black Sabbath.
Source:Discogs.com
Here is what our AI-generated
Sepultura’s Roots Bloody Roots. Brazilian band that took over music imagination.
Source:Discogs.com
Here is our rendering. It is refreshingly different and has no need to connect with the actual cover art. This is a new grounds up creation.
Oh no we are not stuck in the past. Here is Front Line Assembly’s “Nerve War” rendered by AI.
& German industrial band Die Krupp’s “Too Much History”.
Here is a rendering for an all-time favorite from Nine Inch Nails: “The Downward Spiral”
Wait a minute. In your mind is this popping? “But we have to prompt the AI machine and that is where the creativity is”. Let’s change that. Put another AI machine before this one. Let it generate names for albums that don’t exist. Basically auto-generate the text prompt. And generate new album cover art.
Here is the “Encapsulation Agent”. A name the AI text creator generated.
& this is “Ghosted Spirits”
For bands & songs of the future. New album names and cover art auto-generated by a machine. Put the code in a loop and 1000s can be auto-generated.
Did you observe that… the album name is also getting rendered in rock font. The learning process is rendered below as a video.
Think about this. A lot of things that humans have discovered already existed in nature… & we explained them. For example rotation, gravity, light, etc. Language, poetry, art, sculpture, etc are forms that didn’t per see exist in nature but as humans we created them. It didn’t exist before. A higher form of intelligence. An Artificially Intelligent machine just did exactly that!!!
Love any of these and want to make them your own? Head here https://opensea.io/decodemai & make an offer.