Category Archives: music

Living In A Tilted World: A Fake Song From A Fake Band

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Wrecked Cottage Song

This morning’s prompt at DS106 Daily Create had to do with using an old Public Domain image of a bunch of men standing on the deck of an old, tilting house, and to imagine them as a band releasing a song. I used Canva to design their “single” track, which I called Living In A Tilted World.

I decided to go a step further, using the Suno AI Music site to create a fake song to go along with the fake band. I tried Suno out a few weeks ago and in that short time, I think it has gotten better with a new version of its algorithms (which is both fascinating and alarming, as a creative person worried about the intrusion of AI in our spaces).

I instructed Suno to produce:

an old sea shanty with the title of “living in a tilted world” about a house tilting into the ocean

Take a listen to the Suno single: Tilting Tides.

Catchy, right?

Peace (in the great fake out),
Kevi

AI Music: Another Step Forward

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AI Generated Song

Since last year, I have been playing around and experimenting with the emergence of AI tools that create music (see earlier posts). Some of it has been interesting. Most have been pretty bland. As someone who makes music, but who keeps an open mind about technology, I’ve been trying to keep tabs on things (as best as one can do).

Suno, a new site to me but I guess it has been around for a few months, is quite different in the way that it integrates music, voice and lyrics in its AI production, and it quite a leap forward from the other sites I have tinkered with.

It works like a sort of a Chatbot — you write in a theme or topic and suggest a music style and it works to craft a short blurb of a song, with music and with vocals singing words generated by some sort of ChatGPT text. The quality here is much higher than other sites I have played with.

And the results, while still formulaic and a bit generic in sound, are interesting and show how songwriting and music production are the next wave of these AI tools. They may never supplant musicians and songwriters (he writes, hopeful) but they do demonstrate how making song tracks could become rather automated in the time ahead of us, either for commercial products or some other means.

Listen to a song I had Suno generate about our dog, Rayna, and her days snoozing on the couch.

Then listen to a song I had it create about Duke Rushmore, a fictional musician whose name is the name of my read rock and roll band.

Weird, right?

Peace (and song),
Kevin

Daily Create: Coloring

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Coloring: In An Otherwise Odd World

The prompt for this morning’s Daily Create via DS106 was to use Scrap-Coloring to color an image or file. I’ve used the site before and it’s easy to get lost in it, particularly if the image has a lot of little details. I chose the cover design of my album of sound sketches from last year. (take a listen).

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

Song: Constellations (Moments Left Behind)

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I’ve been trying to get myself into a regular routine again of writing songs, and taking any kernel of something to the next steps, of demo recording and maybe making a video to go with it. This one — Constellations (Moments Left Behind) — might still need some work but I like the way I am trying to use constellation stories as a way to frame our own experiences. I think it sort of works.

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

Music: Street Stomp

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The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) that I use for making music with loops often has new packages of sound that I try out. Last week, the package was interesting, with a Mariachi-style series of loops. So I played around a bit to make this Street Stomp piece.

Peace (and strings),
Kevin

Video Documentary: The Last Repair Shop

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When I was a kid, my father (a drummer) used to bring me to visit a musical instrument repair shop for odds and ends, and it would be a place I enjoy just being in, just hanging out in.

It was called George’s Music Shop, and George was the man behind the counter, and when I was learning saxophone, it remained a place of wonder. I even used my memories there for a collection of connected short stories at one point (NOTE TO SELF: dig that up and revisit the stories)

This documentary — The Last Repair Shop – is a wonder of capturing a place in Los Angeles, and how the shop is a hub for fixing things and maybe, people.

It also inspired my morning poem:

On a memory stop
to an old repair shop
on Main, a whistle in B flat
ringing on the door, opening,
explaining I’m here,
aiming to get a broken sax,
fixed; worn pads,
replaced; things sound
better, with love

I hand it to the man
behind a glass counter
littered with sheet music,
cork grease, guitar strings –
his probing fingers pour
over every turn of the neck,
the bell, the cage, the springs

In a gruff voice, he speaks,
in a sort of bebop rhyme:
he’ll weave some magic
to make my sax sing again –
come back in two weeks time

Peace (and repairs),
Kevin

Gift Of Peace (Solstice 2023)

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Each year, I try to do at least one or two different things with a song for the holidays that I wrote some years back with my friend, John Graiff. This year, I tried an acoustic version, with some slight musical and lyric changes, and last night, my friends Bob and Greg joined in playing and recording the song.

Here is the original version:

Peace (and light),
Kevin

Google’s New AI Tool: MusicFX

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I have long been interested (sometimes, alarmed) by how some of the new machine learning/AI tools might impact the making of music. Mostly, I have not been all that impressed (good thing for human music composers, right?) but I also know that the technology is only getting better. (See some earlier posts)

The results have been awful or weird or un-listenable.

Google just released its new tool called MusicFX in its AI Test Kitchen (so, you know, beta) and, well, it’s a big leap forward to what I was playing around with just a few months ago. You write in text about the kind of music you want, and you can add genre, instrumentation, etc, and the site generates a 30 second track. The few experiments I did sounded decent.

Bad news for human music composers? Maybe.

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

PS — there’s also a new TextFX in the same platform but I can’t for the life of me figure out its value.