British soul sensation NAO partners with Microsoft to drop groundbreaking AI-driven Music Video

NAO TAKES FANS INTO “ORBIT” WITH INTERACTIVE MUSIC VIDEO POWERED BY MICROSOFT AI

From the Sky to Your Screen, NAO’S New Video is a Truly Personalized Experience.

British singer-songwriter and rising R&B star NAO announces her never-before-seen interactive and personalized music video to support the track “Orbit” on her new album Saturn, released late in 2018.

The “Orbit” music video is centered on a Saturn return, a unique occurrence for each of us that exists when the planet returns to the same place in the sky that it occupied at our moment of birth. The astrological inspiration of the song is known as a personally tumultuous time that allows NAO fans a more intimate connection with the artist and her work. Partnering on this unique experience with Microsoft, NAO and the team’s use of Microsoft AI allowed them to create visualizations based on both user inputs and cloudpoint data collected from a dancing NAO, taking this fan-artist connection even further.

To customize the “Orbit” music video the viewer enters their birthday, initiating the launch of a zodiac-filled night sky in which NAO and a dancer move. Colors of the sky and stars can be adjusted by the fan as the AI picks up the different constellations in the dancer’s bodies, as well as the fan’s own astrological sign. At completion, fans can share an image of NAO posing in the stance of their astrological sign, along with a plot of Saturn’s return in their own personal timeline.

The process for the music video began at Microsoft’s volumetric capture studio in San Francisco, where cameras captured NAO and a dancer performing choreography to “Orbit” that transformed their bodies into point clouds of data. The Microsoft Azure Custom Vision Service was then trained to identify constellations within their movements, resulting in a truly customized experience that allows fans to connect emotionally with NAO’s own personal story.

Based in East London, NAO has a sound that’s a mix of soul, funk, R&B and electronic music — what she calls as “wonky funk”. Saturn is her second studio album, released in October 2018 and supported by the singles “Another Lifetime” and “Make It Out Alive”. The upcoming “Orbit” music video release with Microsoft is scheduled for April 26, with a special in-depth experience as a media preview set for April 25 in London, UK.

For more information on NAO, visit www.ThisNAO.com.

For information on the collaboration, visit Microsoft.com/InCulture.