TikTok, the Chinese social media app operated by ByteDance, is one of the most popular ever.
Users of the app have long create viral clips and laughable content that the internet should remember. From short music, lip-sync, dance, comedy and talent videos that can be 15 seconds long, TikTok helps shape social media in general, and makes it a lot more interesting.
But the appeal of TikTok videos, should be attributed to the songs that are played in them.
A song is a musical composition that often has distinct and fixed pitches and melodies. It can make dull things colorful, and turn sorrow into fun.
That is what clearly happens on TikTok.
For many content creators on TikTok, all they need is a hit song to make their videos viral.
But with the diverse taste of music people can have, how can one know what should song be a hit on TikTok?
Well, this AI startup had an idea.
Musiio started by analyzing the top 120 songs based on TikTok’s ‘TikTok Trending’ playlist on 18 May 2020, and found that half of all TikTok hits were Hip Hop, with the Opera and Classical songs as non-existent.
The system also found that most of the top TikTok songs were between either 60 to 80 bpm or 105 to 130 bpm.
Musiio then stepped up the game by using AI to analyze those viral videos on TikTok, to conclude the 'perfect' song for TikTok videos.
The team started using AI to experiment with Hip Hop as the choice of genre, and created samples with a similar tempo for the track.
The system revealed that TikTok’s most popular musical moods are unsurprisingly those that are either “powerful,” “energetic,” or “quirky” track. The AI recommends to avoid negative vibes such as “sadness,” “neutral,” or “scary.”
The songwriters then tweaked the samples to meet the musical moods.
And for the final touch, the team decided to focus on the beat, and enhanced it with a melody that can be considered “quirky” enough to stand out in the crowd of generic Hip Hop beats.
To do this, the team took influence from Gamelan, a traditional ensemble music of the Javanese, Sundanese, and Balinese peoples of Indonesia, which made up predominantly of percussive instruments.
While Gamelan has a distinct sound to it, and being known as a percussive instrument, it can also include xylophones, bamboo flutes, and a stringed instrument called a rebab.
To make it even more interesting, the team at Musiio added “power” to the rhythm by combining a distorted bass drum with some hi-hats and snares.
Finally, they put everything together into one final track.
The team then ran the song through the AI once again.
Here, the team found that the song has they created has a 41% Hip Hop rating, an encouraging mood combination of 64% quirky and 41% powerful, and a decent emotion score of 33% positive.
TikTok may be a controversy in many parts of the world, including the U.S. that said it should be sold to a "very American" company, and banned in India because it turned people into murderers.
But that don't stop TikTok's appeal.
And Musiio is simply showing just that.