Meet Zhaion, the Detroit AI R&B Artist With a Real Human Behind the Music
Detroit musician Edmund Gray has created AI-hybrid R&B artist Zhaion, combining his own songwriting and voice with AI production.
Zhaion is an AI-hybrid music project created by Detroit musician and songwriter Edmund Gray, who also releases his own music as Grateful Edmund.
Zhaion’s second album, No Clearance, arrives with nine tracks and a deliberately darker R&B sound, but the project is quite different from simply typing a prompt and asking AI to produce an album.
Who is actually behind Zhaion?
Edmund writes the songs and uses his own physical voice as part of the process, combining it with engineering and AI production to create Zhaion’s finished sound.
He describes the character almost like creating someone for a comic book, with Zhaion having his own appearance, personality and continuing story.
That story even develops between albums. Zhaion’s earlier music followed relationship problems after being left “on read”, while No Clearance presents a changed character with a darker look and sound.
Importantly, Edmund is open about the technology involved. Rather than presenting Zhaion as a mysterious real singer, he has spoken publicly about creating the character and how human songwriting, his own voice and AI come together.
AI artist, human creator
That transparency makes Zhaion particularly interesting as AI-generated music becomes more common.
Edmund has criticised projects that flood streaming services with enormous quantities of AI music in the hope that something becomes successful. Zhaion, by comparison, is being developed as an individual artist with albums, visuals and an ongoing identity.
There’s even an 8-bit online game connected to Zhaion’s fictional world, expanding the project beyond the songs themselves.
Rather than asking whether AI can replace a musician, Zhaion presents a different idea: a musician using AI to create and perform through an entirely new character
With No Clearance, that virtual character is now getting his second chapter.
Official Spotify link
