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

“Rockin’ Around The “Christmas Tree” is one of the most iconic songs of the holiday season, renewing the charts every year and reaching number one in 2023, 65 years after the song’s debut. But the world’s biggest record company is looking to take the track to an even more global audience artificial intelligence.

Universal Music Group released “Noche Buena y Navidad,” a Spanish-language version of the classic Christmas song, on Friday, featuring Brenda Leehis 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 fit the new language. The references to mistletoe and pumpkin pie, for example, are not in the Spanish version, and the Spanish version translates to “I want to dance with you and enjoy Christmas.”

Brenda Lee – “Noche Buena Y Navidad”

The song is one of AI’s most significant music releases to date, marking one of the few instances where a record label has sanctioned the use of voice dubbing on a commercial release. “Noche Buena y Navidad” comes about four months after UMG announced a partnership with AI music startup SoundLabs over the summer, promoting the new offering as a way for artists to create their own voice clones. At the time, companies listed language transcription as a promising use of the technology so artists could reach fans more directly, even if their music isn’t in the same language.

“One of the things we’re super excited about is augmenting the human process,” says Brian “BT” Transeau, founder of SoundLabs and a songwriter who’s 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 getting the music in the fans’ native languages ​​while hearing the artist’s voice makes for “such an emotional experience” for the listener. “Music is this universal channel of a language,” he says. “And of course, the human voice … usually leads and tells the story. I only speak English, but if I were someone who is constantly bombarded with songs that I love but it’s not my first language, it would be so great to hear it in the language I speak.”

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Artificial intelligence remains a touchy subject in the music industry, with record labels and artists alike expressing concern that the technology is giving way to rampant copyright infringement and the unauthorized use of artists’ name, image and likeness. And of course, there’s still the fear that artificial intelligence might replace human creations altogether. Meanwhile, AI’s ability to mass-produce shlock was essential to helping a the alleged fraudster to siphon off tens of millions of dollars in copyright from real artists.

With these issues in mind, music companies are dipping their toes in cautiously, recognizing the useful tools AI can provide while also taking action against uses they didn’t allow. All three major record labels sued prominent AI music generators Suno and Udio earlier this year due to massive infringement allegations. companies they fought backclaiming 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 “blown away” by the new recording.

“Throughout my career, I’ve performed and recorded many songs in different languages, but I’ve never recorded ‘Rockin’ in Spanish, which I would have loved to do,'” she said. “It’s incredible to put this out now and I’m happy to introduce the song to fans in a new way.”

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

Before the SoundLabs partnership was officially announced this year, UMG tapped multi-time Latin Grammy-winning producer Aureo Baqueiro to help make the song, and it was Baqueiro who rewrote the song’s lyrics so they made sense in Spanish while it still fits. the phonetics and rhythm of the song. That alone took about two to three weeks, he says Rolling Stone. After it was finished, he brought in a studio singer named Leyla Hoyle to do the vocals, and Baqueiro sent them to SoundLabs so he could overlay them with Lee’s vocal clone.

While Hoyle is a native Spanish speaker, as he would get some of the audio converted back, some lines would sound more like an English speaker trying to sing in Spanish and would need to be altered. But by the end, Baqueiro says, they created what he believes is as close to a Spanish version of the song as they could have done.

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

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

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

How labels will handle these credits in general is still unclear, given that there are only a few cases where this happens. When Warner Music Nashville released AI Randy Travis’ “Where That Came From” last spring, it tapped singer James Dupré as the track’s “vocal bed.”

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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 sizable following in Japan is interested in taking one of their recordings and remaking it for a Japanese translation.

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