AI SONG CONTEST 2024
SUDAMÉRICA
Onda Corta · First prize, AI Song Contest 2024
Bernarda Castillo and I entered the AI Song Contest in 2024 as Onda Corta, and won it, the first Latin American team to do so.
The song started from a question rather than a melody. Instead of writing about the continent out of our own idea of it, we asked three language models for the key concepts that define South America and looked for what they agreed on. Tango, football, biodiversity. The stereotypes arrived first, and they arrived agreeing with each other.
So we kept asking. We prompted ElevenLabs with those concepts, with country names, with phrases like "Uruguayan murga" and "Music from Bolivia", and generated more than a hundred short clips. What came back was rarely what we had asked for: tribal percussion, vaguely mystical textures, harmonies closer to East Asia than to the Andes, and, from "Chilean man singing", a caveman grunt that became our favourite sound in the piece. We kept the failures. They are the most honest thing these systems produce about a place they have barely heard.
The lyrics came from a language model too, and they brought in the Indigenous references the concept lists had left out, including the Maya, who are not South American at all. We kept that error as well.
The rest was studio work: twenty-three samples chosen out of the hundred, one separated into bass, percussion and piano to use as the base, composed by looping and layering in a DAW, with vocals I recorded and then ran through a voice conversion tool. Berny mixed and mastered it.
We never trained a model, and we had no control over what these systems learned from. The distance between what a tool knows and what it has never heard is what I have been working on since.
Sudamérica [2024] - Onda Corta
AI Song Contest 2024 ceremony (Full)
Live at Zurich, Switzerland (AI Song contest 2024 Final)
2025 JUROR
You didn’t come this far to stop
After winning, the organisers invited me back the following year to sit on the jury. It meant listening closely to a large number of entries and reading the process document each team submits alongside its song, which is where the variety really shows: projects that share a label and almost nothing else. I was at the ceremony again, this time from the other side, and watched another Latin American team, GENEALOGY from Brazil, take the prize.