Dadabots in Bangkok, Thailand: how Eye learns how two musicians trained neural networks to generate nonstop metal music, and checks the clefs before her AI piano lessons

Eye is thirteen and lives in Bangkok, Thailand, with an older brother who plays drums in a heavy metal band. Their condo shakes when he practises on his electronic kit, and Eye wears headphones to escape the noise. One night he showed her a video that he claimed had no human musicians at all: a stream of furious metal music that apparently never ended.

The stream was made by Dadabots, a project created by CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski, two musicians who also work with technology. They began experimenting with AI-generated music in the 2010s, interested in what would happen if a machine listened to entire albums and then tried to produce its own sounds directly as audio.

Unlike programs that write sheet music or notes for instruments, Dadabots trained neural networks on raw audio, the actual waveforms of recordings. The model they used, based on an approach called SampleRNN, learned to predict what sound should come next, tiny slice by tiny slice. Over time, the output started to resemble the style of the training recordings, including drums, guitars and screamed vocals.

The results were strange and fascinating. Some passages sounded convincingly like genuine musicians, while others dissolved into chaos. Carr and Zukowski released albums of AI-generated music in styles such as black metal and math rock, and they published research describing their methods, treating the project as both art and experiment.

In 2019 they launched Relentless Doppelganger, a YouTube livestream of technical death metal generated by a model trained on the Canadian band Archspire. The stream ran around the clock, day after day, producing endless new music with no human performer. News sites wrote about it, and listeners debated whether it counted as real music.

A livestream that never stopped

Eye's brother found it both impressive and a bit unsettling. He said the model could imitate the surface of a style but did not seem to know where a song was going or why. Real bands write music to express something, he explained, and AI output still needs people to decide what is worth sharing.

Dadabots also raised questions about the music industry. If machines can produce endless audio in a band's style, what happens to copyright, and should the original artists be asked for permission? Carr and Zukowski worked with some musicians directly and spoke publicly about collaborating with artists rather than replacing them.

Eye began piano lessons on TiGA AI after that conversation. She wanted to understand music from the inside, not just listen to what machines produced. The online piano learning app runs on her tablet, and the AI piano teacher listens to each attempt, highlighting uneven passages so she knows exactly where to focus next.

Eye's routine before the opening bar is to touch the clef that starts each stave, the treble on the high line and the bass on the low one, then breathe out. Her brother laughs at it, but he admits that drummers also check their charts before counting in a song, so she keeps doing it.

Her piano course recently introduced minor keys and dramatic dynamics, which she connects with the dark sound of metal. Eye practises a stormy study, letting the low notes rumble before the melody bursts in. Her sibling insists it sounds heavier than some of his band's songs.

For students who want to learn piano, Dadabots offers an interesting lesson. AI can generate sounds at enormous scale, yet it still struggles with intention and storytelling. A pupil who learns to play piano develops exactly those human qualities, choosing why a phrase should rise or fall.

At school, Eye's music lessons included a debate on AI in the arts. She described the endless metal stream and asked classmates whether a song needs a human to be meaningful. The discussion was lively, and her teacher asked her to write a short report on it.

Eye hopes to join her brother's band on keyboard someday and play music that blends piano with heavy guitars. She imagines a song that opens with a quiet keyboard melody before the drums and distorted riffs crash in, a contrast she already practises in her stormy study.

Late evenings at home have settled into a pattern. While her brother practises on the electronic kit with headphones on, Eye completes her AI piano lessons on the sofa, then plays the stormy study once more, proving that a human can still bring drama no machine has fully understood.

Frequently asked questions

Q: Who are Dadabots? A: Dadabots is a project by musicians and technologists CJ Carr and Zack Zukowski. They train neural networks on recordings so the models learn to generate new audio in a similar style.

Q: What was Relentless Doppelganger? A: Launched in 2019, it was a continuous YouTube livestream of AI-generated technical death metal produced by a Dadabots model trained on music by the Canadian band Archspire. It ran day and night without a human performer.

Q: Is AI-generated music a replacement for learning an instrument? A: No. Projects like Dadabots raise interesting questions, but playing music yourself builds skills, memory and joy that listening cannot. AI piano lessons use AI to support a learner, not to replace them.

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