Technical death metal sounds like music written by robots. Now, it’s actually being done by robots.

Berklee College of Music graduates Zack Zukowski and CJ Carr have created an artificial intelligence software that continuously generates technical death metal. The process can be seen on their live stream, which they state is running “24/7 to infinity.”

The AI was taught this process by using Relentless Mutation, the 2017 full-length album from Canadian tech-death legends Archspire.

The two explain the process and reasoning behind the album choice below:

“The neural net we used listened to Relentless Mutation over and over again. All raw audio, no tabs, no midi. It generates what it thinks it hears and tunes itself until it begins to intimate the sounds from the original album. After generating, it randomly stitches the audios together, refills the buffer, and streams it with ffmpeg. Repeat.

 

The remarkable part is the high quality-to-shit ratio. We tried this with 100 albums and found that Archspire’s music made for the most interesting bot. Zero curation was necessary. Everything it generates sounds good to us. You’re hearing everything it makes. Our theory is the faster the blast beats, the more stable the net. Archspire is absurdly fast – they are basically machines. So far, we haven’t found anything that works better.”

Archspire has responded to the creation of this AI, jokingly referring to the band’s guitarist Tobi Morelli as also being nothing more than a computer himself.

“We’ve been hearing about this ‘AI that’s trained on Archspire writing death metal’ over the past few weeks. Well, here’s the thing: We actually aren’t surprised about this. We’ve been utilizing very similar technology to write our music this entire time. The program we’ve been using? It’s called T.O.B.I. It stands for:

Technically
Outrageous
Boner
Inducer

“Tobi has been part of our writing process since 2009, and while you may notice that he takes on a physical form as guitarist in the band, rest assured under those tight fitting clothes, he’s more machine than man.”

The interesting part is that it does indeed sound like technical death metal, and it sounds like Archspire to an extent. It’s surprising how much of the source material translates when processed by AI.

Obviously, this won’t be releasing its own albums any time soon, but we’re hoping they can take this on the road as Archspire’s opener, at the very least.

The livestream can be viewed below:

 

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