​Computational Techniques For Making Karaoke Harder

​The world is hurtling toward a crisis: karaoke is getting too easy. Safety researchers now project that by the year 2030, everyone will be bored of every song and the karaoke industry will collapse, setting off a domino effect that destroys civilization in an event known as the Karaokalypse.

​Hosted by Numeric, your AI-assistant across the entire accounting lifecycle, Jamie Brew (The Onion, ClickHole, Botnik, RC W2 2019) will present humanity's last hope: The Weird Algorithm, a state-of-the-art system for making karaoke harder by changing the words but keeping the melody. Given an input song, it replaces the lyrics with fragments of text from specific datasets (e.g. Craigslist ads for old cars, Yelp reviews of psychics and the script of Mean Girls) to create a new song that has never been sung before and will never be sung again.

​Through a series of demos and deep dives, we'll cover a range of karaoke hardening techniques from the fields of natural language processing (NLP), artificial "intelligence" (A"I") and showbiz. We'll look at how to collect, annotate and model data for procedural use, and at how the software project has grown in tandem with the live show. We'll consider some alternative metaphors for text generation besides "the machine is a person" and address the urgent question of whether it's ethical to work on anything other than avant-garde karaoke research. Singing along will be optional, encouraged, and nearly impossible.

​Numeric is the AI-powered close management platform. Organize your close, streamline reconciliations, and leverage AI for auto-drafted flux analysis + reporting. Spend less time on the manual, and more time on the impactful.