Case Study: Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears (a Eurovision AI SONG)

In May 2019, Tel Aviv hosted the 64th Eurovision song contest for the 4th time. As all of Europe (together with Israel and Australia) waited for this year’s oh-so-glamorous and famously kitschy song contest, a group of artists, musicians and programmers have asked themselves is there a special DNA for a Eurovision song? What makes it a hit or a flop? What makes it memorable? And What makes it a winner? We decided to explore human creativity through technological innovation by creating an Artificial Intelligence Eurovision song that celebrates this melodramatic & campy song competition. 

The project team fed hundreds of Eurovision songs – melodies and lyrics – into a neuron network. Then, algorithms produced thousands of new tunes and lines of verse, from which a few musical units - a chorus, a verse and a c-part were carefully selected and “welded” into a song. The result - a Eurovision song that comprised entirely of material written and composed by Artificial Intelligence. Titled "Blue Jeans & Bloody Tears", the song is a hilarious, weird and catchy duet on disillusioned love between man and machine. For the “man” role we casted none other than legendary singer Izhar Cohen - Israel's first Eurovision winner (1978) and to musically produce it we reached out to Avshalom Ariel - who co-produced Israel’s most recent Eurovision win (“Toy”, 2018). 

Within hours and without any paid promotion the video reached dozens of global and local media outlets celebrating our song; From podcasts and radio stations playing it, to TV stations, magazines and newspapers loving it - or loving to hate it. Reddit users debated their favorite line in countless threads, Youtubers covered the song, fans wrote down the chords progression and most of all people analyze the song lyrics looking for hidden meanings. Not only were the accolades tremendos, the song surpassed official Eurovision entries from countries like

Austria, Albania, Belarus, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Georgia, Hungry, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, and the the United Kingdom making us unilaterally declare our song as the true winner of the 2019 competition. Robots 1, Humans 0.