Grimes Composes a Lullaby Just for You

Like many new parents, Grimes spent much of her baby’s first months trying to coax him to sleep. One evening, she had an idea.

“Lil X prefers to sleep with ambience,” she says, referring to her son, whose full name is X Æ A-Xii. “So I thought, ‘I might as well customize his sleep.’”

That nighttime epiphany turned into a novel collaboration with Endel, an app that generates ambient soundscapes by taking into account real-time personal data—like your heart rate and how much you’re moving—as well as external factors like time of day, weather, and level of natural light.

Endel takes all those data points and plugs them into an algorithm that builds a soothing, flowing soundscape specifically for how you are right now.

That mix of art and AI proved an enticing playground for Grimes, whose albums blend her idiosyncratic voice with bubbly electronic elements she engineers herself. For the Endel project, she created building blocks instead of finished pieces—washes of loops, beats, field sounds, and her own auto-tuned vocals that the Endel team used to create its generative music. The “AI Lullaby” will be live through the end of December.

“It’s basically live remixing of ambient music by robots for babies,” says Grimes.

Oleg Stavitsky, Endel’s CEO and a longtime admirer of ambient-music pioneer Brian Eno, says the project felt like inventing a new way to experience music.

“I’m a fan of not just Brian’s music but his philosophy, his idea that the composer should let go of control,” Stavitsky says. “That’s exactly what happened here. Grimes provided the building blocks, but she never actually knew what was going to come out of them.”

Grimes started by creating a series of “stems”—snippets from one to 30 seconds long of individual notes, chords (the project is built on a pentatonic scale, so everything blends together harmoniously), paths (drone-like sounds), and field recordings of rain, wind, and other atmospherics.

Endel’s in-house composer, Dmitry Evgrafov, then tagged these stems so they would surface at appropriate moments in a user’s sleep cycle.

In the end, Grimes composed more than a thousand stems. “It was such a beautiful dialogue between two artists,” says Stavitsky.

That unique blend of music, machine, and motherly instinct successfully soothed little ears, as Grimes intended. But the project is also a peek into the future of music, she says. “This might feel like a collaboration with a technology, but it’s also a collaboration with the people who made that technology.”

To Grimes, art and tech aren’t mutually exclusive. “I don’t think we should underestimate an algorithm,” she says. “As humans, we use emotional tools, like paintbrushes. Algorithms are just new tools. And they’re clearly able to elicit an incredible amount of human emotion.”

Especially from one very young person in particular.

Endel: Focus, Sleep, Relax

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