This folk song was partly written by a computer — but musicians aren't becoming obsolete just yet

When the musician Sam Genders came across a magazine article reporting how artificial intelligence was making inroads into songwriting, he did not run screaming to the hills but rather thought he spied an opportunity.

Genders has long been fascinated by science and technology – his 2015 single “General Relativity” marked the centenary of Einstein’s landmark theory – and so the prospect of writing a song with a computer program quickly piqued his interest. “It was something I had never done before,” he says, “so I thought I would give it a go.”

The results can be heard in his band Diagrams’ new folk single, “Is This Real”. While Genders, 43, has ensured that the song still has a human warmth to it, he insists that he would never have been able to write it without the computer’s help.

“I had the final say, of course, which was nice, but the programs I used took the song in a direction I simply wouldn’t have gone in otherwise,” says the songwriter, from Matlock, Derbyshire.

Genders worked with Maya Ackerman, a professor of computer science at Santa Clara University in California, who has co-developed two systems. The first, Alysia, processes short lines of text and associates each syllable with a musical note. The second, Mabel, is designed to write lyrics to melodies.

Initial results were not promising, Genders admits, saying: “The tune was at nursery rhyme level at best, to be honest.” But when he tried again a few months later, he was amazed by their advances. “To see how quickly they had developed was brilliant, and Mabel threw up some really interesting, weird and psychedelic lyrics.”

Mabel’s efforts come in half way through the second verse of “Is This Real”. “And he waits for the sun to come to blows,” the program wrote. “His hair is laughing at the lark/Where a calico wind is never lost/In a lonely church of broken mirrors.” One might reasonably argue that Ed Sheeran’s wordplay is not anywhere near as sophisticated.

What are the implications for music, and musicians? Michael Sweeney, an official at the Musicians’ Union, has concerns. “It can be an interesting tool to help generate ideas as an antidote to writer’s block,” he says. “But if people are trying to use machine-generated material to somehow supplant human beings, then there would be serious moral concern there.”

Genders is more open-minded. “All art forms have a way of evolving,” he argues. “People thought folk music would be killed off when electric took over, but that didn’t happen, it just opened up new avenues of creativity.

“I think this has a similar potential, and that the lines between humans and technology will become increasingly blurred over time. Who knows just how much? But what I can tell you now is that I found it fascinating to engage with. And I do rather like the results.”

‘Is This Real’ by Diagrams is out now on Bookshop Records; withalysia.com