Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, Imagined by Midjourney

Stairway to Heaven is without a doubt one of the best rock songs in history, and its lyrics have some peculiarities that definitely call attention. For decades we've tried to analyze it looking for a deeper meaning or hidden messages; however, a YouTuber named Daara decided to feed it into Midjourney as a series of separate prompts so the algorithm would generate images. The result is… impressive.

November 8, 1971. A new album with no official name, a song that took over FM radio, and 50 years later we still can't stop talking about it—or listening to it every now and then. Of course, I'm referring to Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin, which lately was used in a very special experiment.

Stairway to Heaven’s Lyrics Used as Prompts for Midjourney

If you've been following our articles about AI image generation, you already know what Midjourney is and what it can do. Its images stand out for a superior level of detail and truly fantastic landscapes.

YouTube user Daara is exploring the relationship between popular song lyrics and Midjourney results. A couple of weeks ago he shared videos based on works like Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses and Enter Sandman by Metallica, but now it's the turn of Stairway to Heaven… and Midjourney responded much better than we expected.

Now, it's evident the algorithm can't escape its own nature. For some reason it prefers to create red-haired women (I'm not complaining), and just like with Stable Diffusion and DALL-E 2, Midjourney fails to generate anatomically correct human hands. Another shared problem is eyes: both Midjourney and Stable Diffusion tend to introduce eyes of different sizes, while Stable Diffusion is more prone to heterochromia.

Obviously, these experiments won't end here. Most likely, we'll see more songs processed the same way in the future, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone bothers to feed the algorithm entire books to obtain images. There are many public domain texts out there…