Buraq Shabbir
KARACHI: For Pakistani musician Shiraz Uppal, there was only one out-of-the-box solution to what he calls a “dearth of good female voices” in the country: Neha Gupta, the first “Indo-Pak” AI female singer.
Simply put, Gupta is an artificial intelligence-generated entity capable of producing music and vocals. Uppal, a renowned musician, composer and producer, has churned out a string of musical hits that have been popular both in Pakistan and India for the past 25 years.
Some of his popular songs, which have garnered praise across the border in neighboring India, include “Roya Re,” “Tu Kuja Man Kuja,” and “Raanjhanaa.” He owns a studio in Pakistan’s eastern city of Lahore, named S.U. Studios, where he creates music for himself and other musicians.
It was here that Uppal fused music and technology to create Gupta, and decided to use the voice for his son Haadi Uppal’s recent track “Cheti Aa” released last Sunday.
“There is a dearth of good female voices in Pakistan while India is full of female voices,” Uppal told Arab News this week. “So, I decided to create a unique [female] voice that I can use as per my will.
“This hasn’t been done in India yet.”
Pakistani artists, whether they be actors or musicians, have garnered immense praise in India and gone on to become superstars in South Asia. Popular Pakistani artists who made it big in India include Mahira Khan, Fawad Khan, Ali Zafar, Atif Aslam and others.
However, political tensions between the two nuclear-armed neighbors often mean their actors and singers are banned from working in each other’s countries.
Uppal said he wanted Gupta’s voice to be heard globally, wherever Urdu is spoken.
“If it was a Pakistani, Indians wouldn’t have gotten her to sing for them,” he explained. “If it was an Indian, Pakistanis would not have gotten her to sing for them, given the situation between the two countries.
“For me, art has no boundaries.”
Uppal said Pakistani singers face the dilemma that their appeal among the masses increases tenfold when they work in India, which was why he decided to add Gupta, an Indian name that means guardian in Sanskrit, to Neha.
“Neha Gupta was the first name to come to my mind,” he said.
The Pakistani musician went to work on the voice last year as he wanted to create something “new.”
“It’s easy to recreate existing voices so I thought of creating a new voice,” Uppal said. “It took me around two to three months in the process to train AI how a female singer sings, what’s its timbre and tonality like.”
Uppal said he didn’t want to create a feminine sound like that of famed Bollywood singer Shreya Ghoshal but a rather “raw voice” like other Indian singers Rekha Bhardwaj and Sunidhi Chauhan.
Surprisingly, Uppal used a male voice to create Gupta’s sound.
“A male friend of mine sang in falsetto to mimic a female’s voice that was converted to Neha Gupta’s through AI,” he told Arab News. “Gupta represents a middle-aged woman in her early 30s.”
The singer said people really appreciated her first song “Cheti Aa” which features his son, adding that Gupta’s voice would remain the same and could be used in playback singing for women of different ages.
“I can create 10 more voices but right now, I am waiting for the response I get for Neha Gupta,” he said. “If it’s very good, I would love to create new male and female voices.”
Courtesy: arabnews
