Music across borders: Harnessing AI to translate music for singability and accessibility

The project aims to explore how Generative Artificial Intelligence can be leveraged to address widespread challenges in the field of music translation and accessibility of music for people with hearing impairments. Translation of music and accessibility of music, in fact, require complex multidisciplinary expertise that is rarely found among translators or musicians. This general lack of expertise has caused delays and shortcomings in research on these themes within translation studies, and continues rendering translation and accessibility of music rarely practised and very costly.

Relying on prompt engineering and interdisciplinary research, the project first investigates how AI chatbots, in particular Gemini and Chat GpT, can support translators without music expertise to understand the constraints of singability and produce singable translations of lyrics.

Building on results from this first stage of research, the project then explores how the same AI bots can be harnessed to assist sign language translators and subtitlers without music expertise in understanding the constraints of music accessibility and creating accessible translations of music for deaf and hearing-impaired audiences.

Pre-agreed collaborations with award-winning Italian Choir Coro Anthem and Zürich Choir Ars Cantata are in place for this project.