How IBM Watson inspired Alex Da Kid's new song "Not Easy"
Watson uses natural-language processing and machine learning to analyze massive amounts of unstructured data to uncover new insights. For Watson's newest project, IBM teamed up with Grammy Award-winning producer Alex Da Kid, who has produced hits for many artists, including Eminem, Rihanna, and Nicki Minaj, to create a "cognitive song."
Musicians are always looking for inspiration, but it can be difficult to find. That's why a powerful computing system like Watson served as the perfect partner for Alex Da Kid. Watson's ability to identify patterns across data and then make previously unseen connections is something humans have yet to master - or at least, no human can do it like Watson. This capability is what Alex Da Kid needed to find inspiration for a new song.
To start things off, Watson analyzed five years of cultural data, taking the "emotional temperature" of each year. Watson Alchemy Language, a collection of text analysis APIs, then identified significant themes, while Watson Tone Analyzer, a linguistic API, surveyed social posts and blogs to identify the most prominent emotions exhibited. From there, Watson analyzed the lyrics of the top 100 songs from each week of the five-year time frame to understand the emotional sentiment behind each song.
Watson BEAT examined the composition of popular songs, the rhythm, pitch, and instrumentation, which allowed Alex Da Kid to experiment different sounds reflecting specific emotions - music that "listens" to its audience. The music producer then studied data for inspiration, using Watson's findings as an emotional guide.
For visual inspiration, a data visualization was built for Alex to interact with Watson's analysis. The colors of the visualization were based on an analysis done with the Cognitive Color Design Tool using the images, album artwork, and colors that inspire Alex.
It was time for Alex Da Kid to put his skills as a composer to work. He decided to compose a song about heartbreak, a universal emotion that resonates with all audiences in many different forms. The hitmaker used this motif along with his own experiences, to produce the track.
Once done, he tapped three of music's biggest stars - Elle King, Wiz Khalifa, and Sam Harris of X Ambassadors - to perform the resulting anthem, "Not Easy."
This collaborative effort is just one more example of cognitive computing's ability to augment and inspire human creativity.
Stream the full version of "Not Easy" below to see how it turned out.
Join the conversation on Twitter with the hashtag #CognitiveMusic.
Find out how cognitive solutions such as IBM's Watson are affecting different areas of our lives.
This post is sponsor content from IBM and was created by IBM and BI Studios.