Here Comes the Son: Creating Messianic Music with AI

Album art for Here Comes the Son, my Messianic music creation with the help of AI.
A '60s British invasion pop song about the coming of Messiah. 😅

Messianic music is a big part of my life:

• I run Chavah Messianic Radio, the single largest repository of Messianic Jewish music on the web, spanning music from the last 6 decades. 
• I created MessianicChords: lyrics, guitar chords, and piano sheet music for thousands of Messianic songs, helping musicians and worship teams learn and play Messianic music at their congregations.
• I led worship at a Messianic congregation for over a decade, played with other Messianic music groups at conferences, feasts, even state fairs.
• One of my relaxing and joyful past-times is playing on my guitar and singing to the Lord, using our great legacy of Messianic, Christian, and Jewish music. I think it's great we can sing "How Great Thou Art" and "Mi Kamocha" in the same service. 🙂

I'm also involved in the tech world and I'm employed at Microsoft.

So this week when the AI music creation tool Udio went viral, I just had to try generating Messianic music with it. 😎 I thought I'd do something fun with it: a 1960s psychedelic British invasion tune singing about the coming of Messiah. Here's what I came up with:

This melody was inspired by the Beatles of the late 1960s, specifically their song Sun King. The lyrics are inspired by Isaiah 25:9, where it describes the Lord arriving and the people rejoicing. 

After a few hours of fiddling with Udio generating several dozen samples through a variety of prompts, I pieced this one together. I'm pretty happy with it! The build up to crescendo at 1:40 is :chef's kiss:

It's definitely not typical Messianic music, true, but hey, it's something fun and unique.

When I posted this on social media, a Messianic friend, Daniel Kaplan, showed me that he created an entire Passover playlist (17 songs!) using AI:

First Fruits of Zion contributor Aaron Eby tried his hand at this as well for a kids' class. He generated Inside Out, a pop song from Yeshua's words from Matthew 15 about what makes a person unclean:

Fun stuff! OK, so it's not gonna replace Paul Wilbur or Lamb. And it's not as valuable as real, human-created music. But I think these tools have the potential to help musicians create music. Much potential here! And a lot of fun.

The Jerusalem Temple According to Dall-E

Dall-E 2 is the state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) for image generation. You describe in a sentence what you want, and Dall-E will create an image for you. 

Here are some fun examples:

"An astronaut riding a horse in photorealistic style":

"Llama in a jersey dunking a basketball like Michael Jordan, shot from below, tilted frame, 35°, Dutch angle, extreme long shot, high detail, dramatic backlighting, epic, digital art":

"Spiderman reading the Bible, comic style":

"A bowl of soup that is a portal to another dimension, digital art":

Impressive technology from the brightest minds in artificial intelligence.

I enrolled in Dall-E's private beta a few weeks ago and recently gained access. With access to Dall-E, I thought it'd be fun to do some Biblical images, see what fantastic scenes this AI would put together. 

I've seen some beautiful paintings of Jerusalem and the Temple by Alex Levin; might Dall-E do something comparable? I tried out some text prompts and some image prompts. Here's what Dall-E created for me:

Whoa - fascinating, isn't it? I really like those first three.

Some observations.

First, Dall-E seems to think the Temple is always on fire. 😬☠ 

I figure there are two potential explanations for that. First, there are many art depictions of the Romans destroying the Temple, and those often include the Temple aflame. With Dall-E trained on images from the web, it assumes the Temple should look like it's on fire.

Another possible explanation is that even for art depictions of the Temple where it's not being destroyed, there usually still is fire and smoke: on the altar in the courtyard. 

The AI doesn't understand what needs to be on fire, so it just haphazardly puts fire and smoke around the image.

But a pleasant side-effect of all this fire is, it looks like the fire of God's spirit. Some friends commented on these:

"This one doesn’t scream fire to me. It almost reminds me of an artist's rendering of the Holy Spirit around the temple."

"This one is rather beautiful. More like God's glory surrounding the Temple."

"This one reminds me of the pillar of fire in the wilderness"

"At first glance, I totally thought that was just a depiction of the temple filled with the Shekina"

Another observation: Dall-E seems to think that the Temple utilized Greek architecture, even though the Temple predates Greek architecture by several hundred years. I am thinking of those free-standing columns that show up in some of the images that scream "Greek" to me:

For frame of reference, the real Temple looked something more like this:

Which, to be fair, may have had decorative or even supporting columns, but not likely the free-standing columns we know from ancient Greece, e.g. the Athenian temple:

My explanation here is again the training set of images. 

Dall-E was fed millions of images from around the web to teach it what things look like. The web is populated firstly and primarily by Western culture, especially folks from the UK and US. Greek architecture is big in the West, and thus it shows up in the pseudo-mind of our AI Dall-E.

Fun stuff!