Winning the first AI-driven Eurovision-style song contest helped Caroline Pegram follow her heart into a new career with one of Australia’s most innovative music companies.
A household name in Australia, Dr Karl Kruszelnicki is one of the country’s best-known science communicators, lauded for his bubbly character and off-kilter style. Behind the scenes for 21 years, Dr Karl’s manager and producer Caroline Pegram provided the savvy strategic direction, helping to develop books and radio, print and online content that made complex concepts fun and easy to understand.
In driving the Dr Karl brand and business, Pegram has supported a greater understanding of everything from the inner workings of the Universe to the effects of climate change, and has connected young audiences with the joys and wonder of science.
In recent years, however, she’s forged a new career at the frontier of creativity and technology, initially working with one of Australia’s most innovative music technology companies, Uncanny Valley, as its strategy and networks advisor. One early mark of success occurred in 2020, when Pegram and her colleagues helped Australia win the inaugural (and unofficial) AI Eurovision Song Contest. In 2022, she was a finalist in the Australian Women in AI 2022 awards in the AI in Creative Industries category.
Pegram sees such achievements as powerful vindication for her new career path. “This was a big deal to me, as someone who has predominantly been in the ‘engine room’,” she says.
Pegram’s exploration of AI and sound is something of a ‘career homecoming’. Producing for a famous science communicator wasn’t exactly a natural choice for her, she says, given that she doesn’t have a formal science background. “I started out life in sound engineering, mixing for independent Aussie bands, which isn’t something I’ve seen many women do,” says Pegram. “I went on to manage bands, and that’s where I learned about marketing.”
Pegram may not have studied science at university, but she’s always had a technical mind. “I am nerdy,” she says. “My dad was an engineer and I’d ask him questions all the time.”
That’s why, after Pegram met Dr Karl through a friend in the mid-1990s, she jumped at the chance to work with him. “He wanted someone to do office work and I put my hand up for it, even though I couldn’t even type,” she recalls. “I worked out that I could do a typing course and even if it took ages, I’d stick with it.”
It turned out to be a pivotal career move, and one that would develop into producing large-scale, sold-out science events attended by thousands. “I just had a gut instinct about the job,” says Pegram.
‘Eurovision’ calls
After more than two decades working with Dr Karl, Pegram was drawn back to her love of music. In 2018, she joined Uncanny Valley, which offered her the chance to return to her roots in the music industry, applying her now-honed management and production skills. “I’ve been really fortunate to work on good things with good people,” she says.
When a television network in the Netherlands contacted the Uncanny Valley team to ask if they’d be interested in entering a Eurovision-style contest to write a song using AI, Pegram and her colleagues were keen for the opportunity.
Everyone entering the competition was given the same dataset – metadata on the music and stylings of the three best performing songs in the history of the Eurovision Song Contest. The task was to create an artificial intelligence programme that could use this data and add to it by creating a new and unique song.
“I collected previous Eurovision lyrics,” says Pegram. “We discussed the core philosophy of Eurovision and used the key words from the lyrics to train the datasets. We also decided to include something around the bushfires that had affected everyone [at the time].”
The team took some quintessentially Australian wildlife sounds, including those made by koalas, Tasmanian devils and kookaburras, and fed them into the algorithm. “Paying homage to the devastation of wildfire resonated with people around the world,” says Pegram.
The song, Beautiful The World, led the Uncanny Valley team to win the competition, giving Australia its first global music victory in the AI field. “It’s all about showcasing how you can use AI and machine learning to augment processes in the music industry, not to replace people,” says Pegram.
Pegram relishes the opportunity to blend her two passions, music and science, on projects with Uncanny Valley. She looks forward to forging more commercial relationships and creating academic partnerships, such as the Cybernetic Imagination Residency that she holds at the Australian National University School of Cybernetics, through which she is exploring the use of data as soundtracks.
As head of tech and innovation at the inaugural SXSW Sydney event, scheduled for October, Pegram hopes to bring positive stories of technology and innovation to audiences across the music, screen, gaming and creative industries.
“People don’t realise how creative science is,” she says. “My father was an engineer; he could fix anything and that’s a creative pursuit. The fact that scientists want to make art doesn’t surprise me, and using technologies as tools in the creative process is an extension of that.”
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Story by Michelle Fincke
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