When you hear baile funk, you think of Brazil; with amapiano, it’s South Africa; and Jersey club… you get the idea. Could a rhythm like the kraw nai do the same for Thailand? That’s something Thai producer and developer yaboihanoi wants to see. He’s been blending traditional and classical Thai music with electronic music using cutting-edge technology to explore how these sounds can find a common meeting place in a new world.
yaboihanoi (whose name in Thai is ญาบอยฮานอย) is approaching this blending of sounds in a way that’s faithful to its Thai roots but also pushes them into the future. It’s a lofty goal, one full of technological hurdles, limited recordings, and a general malaise towards Thai music among younger locals. “Traditional music has kind of a bad rap,” he says. “Whenever people hear it, they roll their eyes like, ‘Oh, not again.’ Whenever it’s presented, it’s done in a way that’s, ‘This is how it’s always been, and you have to learn to like it just like this or you’re not appreciating our history or culture’.”
To reignite interest in these traditional sounds, yaboihanoi alters them enough to make them sound new, hopefully to get crowds to say, “Wow, this is Thai music?” One way he does this is by using AI tools that he’s developed that transform sound. A family of instruments that caught his particular attention is the oboe-like ปี่ใน phi nai, which is used for ceremonies, and the ปี่ชวา phi chawa, which is played at Muay Thai matches to keep to keep the fighters and crowds hype. (How’s that for hard dance?) But it’s nearly impossible to recreate them digitally. Unlike the phin, for example, where a skilled artist can play a faithful line on a keyboard, the phi nai has all these subtle changes that Western audio tools don’t recognize. So he worked with master phi nai Ajarn Joey who recorded several loops that yaboihanoi chopped up and stitched together. He also ran it all through an AI program he created that can recognize its unique micro-inflections and then transfer them onto different sounds like a flute or a synth. This way it retains its essential Thainess but sounds entirely new as well. “You can take that melodic template and push it into any sonic domain. If you want a filthy lead, it can still be a phi.”
When he talks about using AI to create Thai music, he’s also making a political statement, pointing out how all these tools have deep Western biases and that there isn’t enough data to train new models on Thai or other Southeast Asian music: “Hopefully this is a way to bring these issues to light, in a way that’s much more fun than by simply giving speeches. Instead, we can all listen to some cool music and hear what else would be possible if we thought differently.”
As Thai as yaboihanoi’s early music sounded, the drums were based on a Western dubstep formula. So his next goal was to experiment with the กราวใน kraw nai rhythm, which is used in โขน Khon dance whenever there are marches of demon armies (again with the heavy references). He’d listen to the rhythms on repeat and tap them out on pads until got the rhythm down, then he synthesized a new drum kit guided by the direct samples of Thai percussion. There are some elements, especially the ฉิ่ง ching sound central to Thai music, which are hard to replicate so he created them with generative AI using prompts along the lines of “metal, percussive sound, with a lot of reverb that reminds of clanking in a cave”. “When I tried using direct samples from Thai instruments, they had such a strong sonic association with these traditional sounds that it was hard to break away from,” he says, referring back to his goal of making everything feel new and fresh.
For all of this future-forward thinking, yaboihanoi wants to ensure that he brings tradition into the future rather than replacing it. “I’m trying to make something that doesn’t destroy, but rather integrates,” he explains. “I’m respecting and following the core of what makes Thai music Thai music.” One experience in particular gave him the confidence that he’s on the right track: After making a phi nai track, he brought it back to his teacher Ajarn Joey who could clearly hear the Thainess in the melody. Usually, when they play with non-traditional bands, they bring an altered phi nai along so that they can be in tune with the rest of the band. But yaboihanoi’s music was in tune with him instead. “He doesn’t have to change the way he plays to fit modern music, I changed modern music to fit around the tuning of his instrument.”
