A British group has released an album of about thirty minutes of songs on YouTube with the voice of Liam Gallagher. If the album is a fake, the enthusiasm of the fans is very real.
A group of English musicians, tired of waiting for the fanciful return of legendary British group Oasis since their split in 2009, decided to take matters into their own hands to make Liam Gallagher’s voice resonate again, with a little help from what artificial intelligence can now offer.
“We were tired of waiting for Oasis to finally reform. Now all we have is Liam and his brother trying to outdo each other. isn’t Oasis. So, we decided to train an AI on Liam’s vocal model, and applied it to a few tracks originally written for our short-lived but sentimental band, Breezer (their band, editor’s note)”, explains Bobby Geraghty, singer, lyricist and producer for Breezer, with from the British daily The Guardian.
The result is an album of about thirty minutes, sung by a voice inspired by that of Liam Gallagher and written mainly in the style of Oasis from the mid-1990s. The album is stamped under the name “AIsis” (a mixture from “Oasis” and “AI” for “artificial intelligence”).
“We first wanted to pretend to have found a lost Oasis album, but in the end, we revealed ourselves: we are just normal guys”, specifies Jon Claire, the drummer of the group Breezer, with the daily.
The musicians of Breezer are however aware of the limits of this pirouette: if artificial intelligence is able to perfectly reproduce the voice of Liam Gallagher, they have chosen not to use it to create the lyrics and melodies.
“Artificial intelligence is still under the control of the user. You have to give it exactly what you want it to reproduce. I don’t think we’ve gotten to the point where it’s able to invent lyrics , in any case, in this context. However, a lot of people have asked us if AIsis was entirely generated by an AI, which is not the case”, notes Bobby Geraghty.
“Pure nostalgia”
Everything in “AIsis” was written and composed by Breezer. The true-fake album sparked nostalgic and joyful reactions among the band’s fans. “I’ve been a fan of Oasis since 1994, and it’s like entering a parallel universe. I’m blown away,” jubilant this fan on YouTube. “My god, this is sublime. Many of these titles gave me goosebumps. Pure nostalgia,” said another.
The members of Breezer, despite the success of this first try, do not seem to have a sequel in mind. “We’d rather work with the real Liam on new stuff! I think he’d hate what we did, because it’s not him. Or maybe he’d love it? Who knows,” laughs Bobby Geraghty. The singer of Oasis, he has in any case not given his opinion on the question.
