How a machine chose the songs Atatürk would love
November 2023We all know the songs Atatürk loved. The question behind this project was simpler and stranger: which songs would he love today?
To answer it, thousands of contemporary Turkish songs were turned into mel spectrograms — pictures of sound — and compared, through an auto-encoder model, with the songs Atatürk is known to have loved most. The machine's suggestions were then weighed along several axes by academics, AI artists and music researchers. The whole process took four months.
The resulting playlist was published on Şişecam's Spotify account in November 2023, alongside a documentary about how it was made. The project went on to receive awards from Kristal Elma, Felis, Mixx Awards Europe, MarTech Awards and The Hammers Awards.