Magic Man is a track from the album Hello World, the first pop album composed with artificial intelligence.

Magic Man is a mixture of French pop songs of the 80s, American funk of the 70s, and rock of the fifties.

The lead sheet generated by Flow Machines sounds like an earworm that stuck in my head. Here is the melody played by a basic piano sound.

I made some inconclusive tests, playing a bass on machine-generated accompaniments and singing the melody but the result looked like a pop song without relief.

After feeding the machine with isolated voice tracks downloaded on YouTube, I got a generated result with several voices, including a disco choir and an old crooner performance. The score became very exciting, moreover, a word came back again and again: “my magic man”. Except for that word, the generated text was meaningless:

The German singer Mariama replaced the “disco” generated vocals and I replaced the generated voice of the crooner, by imitating it.

A lot of work was done to finalize this song. Ash Workman and Michael Lovett did a great job of production but the title lost something from its DNA. Here an excerpt from the first demo they sent me :

Works in Ash Workman’s studio prevented him from finishing the mix of this version. Finally, the French sound engineer Fred Decès did the mix after many versions. Benjamin Cholet helped to find this chill touch by optimizing the rhythm sounds with a more present kick.