Anachostic

As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been working on new music for my next "album".  I say "album" as if it’s something that gets released.  They don’t.  It’s just a collection of songs of an era.  I don’t share my music, since it’s mostly for my own enjoyment.  Today I had a bit of a meltdown, which led to a lot of reflection and acceptance.  Big surprise, it’s all about AI.

Every artistic field is running scared in the threat of AI’s creative absorb-and-destroy domination.  Today, it showed its face to me and I was initially captivated in its glamour and quickly fell to pieces.

I had a particular song written and I liked it.  A lot.  But I wondered if it could be even better, so I sent it off to my CB partner, who is gifted with drumming and has a great producer’s ear.  Time went by and as a surprise, he returned an experiment with an AI tool that took my song and redid it as an 80’s anthem.  I want to start with my impressions on the technical results before I get into my emotional crisis.

The song was immaculately produced, perfectly mixed, had drums, keyboards, guitar, and fucking VOCALS.  That last part – I’m still not 100% over the fact that we can generate perfect human speech and now I’m being presented with speech, played back with in-key pitches, vibrato, and vocal expression.  That in itself is unreal to me.  Then there’s the song itself.  My song was uploaded to the server, AI dissected it, extracted the key, the chords, the rhythm, the lead lines, the structure and used it all in its version.  It was overwhelming to hear my song played back to me as if some superstar producer said, "Oh yeah, I had a crack at it and this is what I came up with."

And that’s where I’ll start the breakdown.  This was my song, but it wasn’t my song anymore.  I could never have created this final product.  Never.  And that realization made me extremely hesitant to even suggest it was my song.  The melody and rhythm was mine, and that’s where it stops.  I tried to reason with myself.  This is what every artist has to accept when they work with a heavy-handed producer.  The producer is there to make your song the best it can be.  Accept that you are not a producer, you are a songwriter.

But the song was amazing.  And I couldn’t stop listening to it over and over.  And why wouldn’t I?  This is the exact music I love.  A song I loved and it’s being played by complete professionals.  If I hadn’t written it, I would still love it.  But I did write it.  And after a few hundred listens, I listened to my original again.  This was the crash.

My recording sounded terrible in comparison.  It was thin, weak, basic.  It had my personality, though.  The synth patches, the somewhat silly choices I made in the lead lines that made me smile.  Those weren’t in the AI version.  And I tried to sell my song back to myself with these thoughts.  This is the REAL version, the AUTHENTIC version.  And then, the poison took hold.  This is the ugly version.  Don’t share this one.  Why would you let anyone hear this one when you know what it COULD sound like?

And just like that, I was in the same place that any insecure teen is when they first see themselves presented in an AI beauty filter.

I went through many emotions and tried as best I could to sort them out.  In a past post, I explained how I had just gotten over feeling inadequate about my style of writing.  I was also trying much harder this time around to put more effort into the songs.  For example, I wouldn’t just mix a song and consider it done.  I would mix it down and listen to it over weeks, listening for anything that irks me or nags at me to fix, then I would fix it and start over.  Being faced with a version of my song that I could never hope to rise to, put the thought that I shouldn’t even bother now.

And yet, I still couldn’t stop playing the AI version.  It was slowly becoming the official version.  I’ve listened to it now, without exaggeration, hundreds of times. I started drafting this post in the initial emotional whirlwind.  A couple of days later now, and I’ve sort of come to peace with it, so here’s my current thoughts.

From a technical perspective, it’s unbelievable.  The sound generation – including voice – is beyond comprehension to me.  Stylistically, it nailed the 80’s rock anthem formula, which is an underlying feeling in most of my work.  I like bombast, heraldry, regality, and the algo took that and ran with it.  I spent a lot of listens trying to map the original version to the new version, trying to figure out what pieces it was keying off of and how it was translating them into a mainstream song.  I was able to figure most of it out, but some is still a mystery.

I’ll have to be honest, a couple of times, I was brought to tears with the delivery – in particular, what seemed to be a calculated emotional buildup before the guitar solo.  But in my continual analysis, I was shocked to find, that was me!  The AI captured two things about my version at that point, an unusual key change and a diminished chord that added a bunch of tension before returning to the intro theme.  But truthfully, the vocal melody line AI added was the killer part.

To expand further on that key change, I had inserted a change that caused a odd situation that might usually go unnoticed, where the outro was played a full step lower than the intro, but had the same chord progression.  Typically, writers will move a step up to give additional emotional impact, but I’m weird.  AI didn’t miss it.  The key change was preserved through to the end and when it repeated the chorus it had conceived and played twice earlier, the vocal melody line was altered to fit the different scale, so it had both consistency and variation.

The biggest takeaway for me is that my original song had no commercial potential, but my choice of chords, rhythm, and melody did, if it was constructed in a way to be more mainstream.  It has led me to a strange place that makes me feel bad that I can’t write a polished song, but good that I can write a compelling song with my oddly contrived musical choices.

While proofing this post, my eyes landed on a statement "If I hadn’t written it, I would still love it." And right there is the answer.  This song literally could not exist without me.  No one writes the way I do.  The actual statement should be, if I hadn’t written the original, this song would never have been heard.  I would never have the chance to love it because no one else could have done it.