In warm-up for an AI Celine Dion, AI choir and dancers accompany human orchestra in Hong Kong concert
- Hong Kong Baptist University symphony orchestra’s human musicians were joined by AI ballet dancers and an invisible AI choir. An AI Celine Dion is the next goal
- Voice samples from singers, including the late Leslie Cheung, were used to train the AI choir, part of a project to produce machines that create on their own
As the lights dimmed and the audience settled into their seats in the Hong Kong City Hall Concert Hall in Central on July 14, superficially it seemed as if Hong Kong Baptist University’s (HKBU) symphony orchestra would begin its annual gala concert like any other.
However, the players were joined by some surprising companions – namely, a 320-voice AI choir and several AI ballet dancers who twirled on a big screen as the human musicians performed.
This wasn’t just a gimmick. The virtual singers and dancers were the public’s first glimpse of a university AI (artificial intelligence) project that has a serious – some might say alarming – mission: to translate what it means to be human into computer code so that machines can learn how to behave like emotional beings.
The (invisible) choir created by the University’s Augmented Creativity Lab joined the human orchestra in a rendition of Pearl of the Orient, Lo Ta-yu’s popular 1986 song about Hong Kong.
The computer-generated voices sang live in response to the baton of music director Johnny Poon Ming-lun, and were accompanied by a video backdrop that was also created by AI based on the lyrics.