Where Memory Meets Machine: Làng Văn on AI and the Evolution of Vietnamese Music
In partnership with APG
Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how music is heard and understood, not by replacing the human heart that writes a lyric, but by offering new ways to listen. As a brief taste of that possibility, AI can tease out textures in ageing recordings, suggest fresh arrangements, and even help render meaning across languages. Amid this unfolding backdrop, Làng Văn, a long-established multimedia custodian of Vietnamese musical heritage, is experimenting with these tools to honour what came before while helping those sounds find fresh life today.
Reimagining Tradition with Technology
Làng Văn has long been recognised for preserving an extensive catalogue that reaches deep into Vietnam’s recorded past. Its recent acquisition of the legendary Continental Records, along with its celebrated sublabels Premier and Sơn Ca, marks a pivotal moment in the revival of Vietnamese musical heritage.
Founded in Saigon in 1960, Continental was a cultural institution that gave voice to a modernizing South Vietnam. Under the artistic direction of composer Nguyễn Văn Đông, it fused Western orchestration with traditional instruments and poetic lyricism, producing a sound that was distinctly Vietnamese yet globally resonant.
Now, under Làng Văn’s stewardship, an archive of recordings, including iconic tracks like “Sống Cho Nhau” (Living for Each Other) and “Tình và Tiền” (Love and Money) are being treated as living material. These songs, once frozen in time, are being remastered and reintroduced with care and clarity, aided by AI tools that streamline the location, filtering, and restoration of aging tapes. The goal is to let the original warmth, ache, and elegance of these recordings breathe anew.
Ownership as Creative Leverage
Làng Văn has observed that across the global music ecosystem, conversation about AI tends to circle around common themes: how to respect creators’ rights, how to ensure fair participation in the new economy of machine-assisted creativity, and how to guard artistic authenticity while exploring new forms.
Mimi Nguyễn, Làng Văn COO, says, “A lot of those conversations point to something simple but important. When companies take the time to build clear agreements and stay transparent, their tech efforts tend to go more smoothly. That’s why many are now approaching experimentation and licensing with a bit more care.”
For a heritage label like Làng Văn, those broader debates offer useful signposts rather than prescriptive rules. The company’s position is unique, allowing it to explore machine-learning approaches with a level of clarity and confidence that others may not share.
That sense of ownership unlocks creative possibilities. It enables the use of AI to enrich the listening experience of archival recordings. Moreover, it encourages deeper exploration of the stylistic signatures woven throughout a composer’s catalogue and inspires new artistic dialogues shaped by the legacies of the past. In this way, technology is being positioned as a collaborator with custodianship rather than a shortcut to novelty.
Beyond the Buzz: What AI Really Offers
In Làng Văn’s process, AI can assist in both technical and creative ways. It can uncover hard-to-find or worn-down recordings scattered across different formats, tease apart and enhance audio layers to bring out subtle vocal tones or instrumental warmth, and ease away the noise that may have crept in over years of storage.
The company is also exploring translation as another key area of development. Here, the aim is intentionally not literal transcription but emotional fidelity. “AI can be taught to carry a song’s feeling across languages,” Nguyễn says. “The task is about conveying the warmth, irony, or ache that sits beneath the words.” This approach can help listeners who don’t speak Vietnamese learn lyrics in a way that preserves the song’s emotional architecture, inviting a different kind of intimacy.
Innovation Without Erasure
It’s worth emphasising that there’s a careful balance to strike. For Làng Văn, the promise of AI lies in widening the audience for Vietnamese music while preserving the essence that makes each recording meaningful. By restoring audio clarity and offering translations that aim to reflect mood as much as meaning, the technology can remove friction from listening without rewriting history. Nguyễn says, “Preservation is an act of justice to the music. Any tool we use should help the original breathe, not replace it.”
Bridging Past and Future
Làng Văn’s ownership of its catalog offers rare freedom to experiment, pairing technical speed and interpretive depth with a guiding philosophy that values emotional truth over strict literalism. This approach allows heritage music to be introduced to new ears in ways that feel both respectful and fresh. If music is a bridge between past and present, Làng Văn is shaping that crossing with care. It leverages AI tools to clarify, translate, and reimagine, while keeping the original voices at the center. The work is exploratory and open-ended, but the intent is always to help Vietnamese music travel further without losing what makes it resonate.