Is this real or did artificial intelligence create this episode? This week an article came out about Artificial Intelligence aka AI used all of Nirvana's songs to create a new Nirvana song. The scientists feed all of Nirvana's songs into an algorithm (first they converted all of the songs to MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) and then the computer created music that sounded like Nirvana. Then they followed suit with the lyrics. Between them both they created a "new" Nirvana song.

Yesterday (5th) marked the twenty-seventh anniversary of Nirvana frontman/guitarist Kurt Cobain's death. He was twenty-seven years old. A project called Lost Tapes of the 27 Club released the "new" Nirvana song titled "Drowned In The Sun." One could assume the song was released after discovering old recordings. However, the track was written by Artificial Intelligence and was released to raise awareness of mental health issues in the music industry.

Fans of Nirvana may do a double-take when they hear'Drowned in the Sun,' a new song created by artificial intelligence that simulates the songwriting of late grunge legend Kurt Cobain. Engineers fed Nirvana's back catalog to Google's AI program, Magenta, which analyzed it for recurring components and then developed an entirely new track. The voice on'Drowned in the Sun,' is 100 percent human, though--provided by Eric Hogan, lead singer of the Atlanta Nirvana cover band Nevermind. The song is just one release from The Lost Tapes of the 27 Club, a project developed by the nonprofit Over the Bridge, which spotlights mental health issues in the music industry. Other AI-generated'lost' tracks have taken their cue from Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and Amy Winehouse, who, like Cobain, died at age 27.

The recently launched Lost Tapes of the 27 Club project uses AI software to create songs in the style of musicians who died at the age of 27. One of the featured tracks is called "Drowned in the Sun", and it comes pretty close to replicating a Nirvana song written by Kurt Cobain himself. With opening guitars starting out restrained before reaching a crescendo on the chorus, the track is reminiscent of Nirvana's signature hit, "Come as You Are". Its chorus sounds like something Cobain might have written, too, with lyrics like, "I don't care/ I feel as one, drowned in the sun." As explained in a Rolling Stone feature, Google's AI program Magenta was used to analyze the pioneering grunge band's music and create the instrumental track.

Ever since Kurt Cobain's death in 1994, Nirvana fans have hypothesized about the music he would have made had he lived. But other than "You Know You're Right," the scabrous, throat-shredding meditation on confusion that Nirvana recorded a few months before his suicide, and a few comments he told confidants about potentially collaborating with R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe or going completely solo, he mainly left behind question marks. Now an organization has created a "new" Nirvana song using artificial-intelligence software to approximate the singer-guitarist's songwriting. The guitar riffs vary from quiet, "Come as You Are"–style plucking to raging, Bleach fury à la "Scoff." And lyrics like, "The sun shines on you but I don't know how," and a surprisingly anthemic chorus, "I don't care/I feel as one, drowned in the sun," bear evocative, Cobain-esque qualities.

There's a Nirvana song that you may not have heard that, ironically, describes why you have heard another Nirvana song, "Smells Like Teen Spirit," which dominated the airwaves in the early '90s and still endures today. It's called "Verse Chorus Verse" and it follows the song structure it's named for, which most pop songs, including "Teen Spirit" and recent smashes like "Old Town Road," rely on. The only weird thing, though, is that the song is about frontman Kurt Cobain's chronic stomach pain and the medications he illegally took. That title is a play on a common dig at pop songs--all of them sound the same. Now, two student researchers at the University of San Francisco have leveraged Spotify data to figure out if that's really true.