Travis Bott is a Travis Scott Wannabe (2020)
In early 2020, a creative agency called Space150 created an AI music bott modeled after rapped Travis Scott named, fittingly Travis Bott. The Travis Bott was trained using all of Scott’s actual lyrics and instructed to spit out a song, complete with lyrics and a melody. Space150 says it extracted the melodies, chords and beat from Scott’s actual tracks which were then used to create a series of midi files that were the building blocks of Travis Bott’s work The resulting product, is a roughly three-minute track called “Jack Park Canny Dope Man.”
“The most surprising aspect of the project is that song is good,” Space150 executive director Ned Lampert said in an interview with Muse. “It sounds like a legitimate Travis Scott song—it has emotion, it has lyrical hooks and pop sensibilities.”
To bring the song to life, the agency employed a human rapper whose voice was altered to sound closer to Scott’s. The accompanying music video features real human actors, though Travis Bott’s face is at times swapped out with Scott’s using a deepfake technology sitting right at the border between cool and creepy.
“Using the music library of Travis Scott, we influenced and trained our machine to produce original beats and lyrics,” Space150 said in a statement. “Our team taught the machine both grammar and rhyming cadence, building custom workflows to match rhyming couplets and number of syllables in each line.”
