UMG Releases AI Spanish Version of ‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’

“Rolling around the “Christmas Tree” is one of the most iconic songs of the Christmas season, climbing the charts again every year and reaching number one in 2023, 65 years after the song’s debut. But the world’s largest record company is looking to bring the song to an even more global audience with artificial intelligence.

universal music group released “Noche Buena y Navidad,” a Spanish version of the classic Christmas song, on Friday, featuring Brenda LeeThe voice cloned from the original recording. Sonically, it’s impressive, it sounds very close to the original, even if the lyrical meaning had to change to adapt to the new language. References to mistletoe and pumpkin pie, for example, are not in the Spanish version, and the first line of the Spanish version translates as “I want to dance next to you and enjoy Christmas.”

Brenda Lee – “Christmas Eve and Christmas”

The song is one of the biggest AI music releases to date, and is one of the few cases where a record label has cleared the use of voice replication in a commercial release. “Christmas Eve and Christmas” comes about four months after UMG announced a partnership with AI music startup SoundLabs over the summer, touting the new deal as a way for artists to create their own voice clones. At the time, companies had listed language transcription as a promising use of the technology so that artists can reach fans more directly even if their music is not in the same language.

“One of the things we’re very optimistic about is augmenting the human process,” says Brian “BT” Transeau, founder of SoundLabs and a songwriter who has worked with Madonna, Death Cab for Cutie and Sting. “That’s part of what makes me really excited about integrating machine learning into this.”

Transeau says that listening to music in fans’ native languages ​​while hearing the artist’s voice creates “a more emotional experience” for the listener. “Music is this universal conduit of a language,” he says. “And, of course, the human voice…usually directs and tells the story. I only speak English, but if I were in the position of someone who was constantly bombarded with songs that I love but that is not my native language, it would be great to hear them in the language I speak.”

Artificial intelligence remains a sensitive topic in the music industry, with record labels and artists alike expressing concerns that the technology will lead to rampant copyright infringement and unauthorized use of the name, image and likeness of the artists. And of course, there’s still fear that AI could eventually replace human creatives entirely. Meanwhile, AI’s ability to mass produce shlock was instrumental in helping a Alleged fraudster will divert tens of millions of dollars in royalties from real artists too.

With those issues in mind, music companies are acting cautiously, recognizing the useful tools AI can provide while also taking action against uses they haven’t allowed. The three major record labels sued prominent AI music generators Suno and Udio earlier this year over allegations of mass infringement. the companies they have counterattackedarguing that AI songs are fair use.

In the case of SoundLabs, they had a license with UMG to do Lee’s voice, and Lee herself approved the final version, saying in a statement that she was “impressed” by the new recording.

“Throughout my career I performed and recorded many songs in different languages, but I never recorded ‘Rockin’ in Spanish, which I would have loved to do,” he said. “Having this available now is pretty incredible and I’m happy to present the song to fans in a new way.”

While the song is a technological initiative made possible by AI machine learning, it is still primarily the result of the meticulous work of real-life human musicians. SoundLabs software helped clean up the roots of the master recording and turned the raw vocals into a Brenda Lee-like sound, but much of the rest was created by humans. “You certainly can’t ask an LLM to do a Spanish translation of a song and expect that, from an artistic point of view, it will be the best translation,” says BT.

Before the partnership with SoundLabs was officially announced this year, UMG turned to multiple Latin Grammy Award-winning producer Aureo Baqueiro to help make the song, and it was Baqueiro who rewrote the song’s lyrics so that they made sense in Spanish and al at the same time it would fit. the phonetics and rhythm of the song. That alone took two to three weeks, he explains. Rolling stone. Once that was done, he brought in a studio singer named Leyla Hoyle to perform the vocals, and Baqueiro sent them to SoundLabs so they could overlay them with Lee’s vocal clone.

While Hoyle is a native Spanish speaker, as they would recover some of the transformed audio, some lines would sound more like an English speaker trying to sing in Spanish and would have to be modified. But in the end, Baqueiro says, they had created what he believes is the closest thing to a Spanish version of the song he could make.

“I was obviously blown away,” Baqueiro says of hearing Lee de Hoyle’s transformed voice for the first time. “It definitely opens up creative possibilities, especially with those older catalog songs that we love. I think it can reintroduce those songs to new audiences.

“I hope this song enhances that experience for listeners,” he continues. You love the song and you know it although in some cases you may not fully understand the lyrics. But the way we did it, I think it’s impeccable in the way it sounds in both languages. Sing, sing the same, sound the same. That’s the part I really like, it enhances the potential and depth of communication with the listener in a new language.”

Releases like this put the music business in uncharted territory, raising philosophical questions about how we view the musical process. Who actually performed the song and how they are credited is a complicated question. While the end result is Lee’s voice, recording is only possible through a kind of vocal surrogate, in this case Hoyle. Hoyle is not listed as a vocalist on the song and it is credited to Lee.

It’s still unclear how record labels will handle such credits in general, as there are only a few cases where this happens. When Warner Music Nashville released AI Randy Travis’ song “Where That Came From” last spring, it designated singer James Dupré as the song’s “vocal bed.”

This may not be the last time UMG uses voice cloning to translate songs. Without saying who, SoundLabs says that an English-speaking UMG artist with a large following in Japan is interested in taking one of their records and remaking it for a Japanese translation.

As SoundLabs COO Lacy Transeau says, “I think this use case from Brenda Lee will really help people see what’s possible in terms of getting people excited about breathing new life into something that already exists.”