Music

Botnik Studios

“You Can’t Take My Door” is a country song written by Botnik Studios, a collective of artists, developers and scientists. The lyrics were crafted through a collaborative process using both machine and human elements: lyrics from thousands of country songs were fed to an RNN, and the trained network was used to generate many candidate song lyrics. The candidate lyrics were sorted by rhyme, and then human editors chose lines to include in the song. The melody and instrument accompaniment were created by Botnik Studios musicians to fit the machine-generated lyrics. The title, “You Can’t Take My Door”, was inspired by a curious observation: that the trained RNN suggested lyrics involving parts of a house more than anyone expected, including doors and shelves. This work models a process by which human artists collaboratively produce new media using artificially intelligent tools.