So-So Udio...AI Music For All
Friday is about music. Well, today it's almost about music. It's about the next-best thing: AI Music. Lol. But never fair. There will be links to other things, and our regular playlist...
A friend messaged me yesterday with a link to Udio. It’s some sort of ChatGPT for music. It’s hideous. And hilarious. And you should rush to it now, hand over your personal info and let that be harvested like black-market kidneys, and have a bit of a play making a shitty piece of music for a scared little laugh.
I did. I signed up as “DJ Slow Rogan”. Seriously, I want to take some old hardcore 45s and play them at 33, pitch the vocals down 10% or whatever and get it all sounding a bit Joy Division. It could be a thing. It could go off. But I won’t do that. So instead it’s my name on an account I’ll get bored of by the time I finish writing this.
I mucked around for not much more than five minutes trying some prompts. I got the machine to make something in tribute to King Crimson, in the style, vaguely, of prog. It took about 70 seconds and spat out something called Tales of the Crimson King. Not bad. The lyrics that it generated though…
Crimson king, tales unfold In the court where shadows play, bold Echoes of the lost time Through the nights, it's where we climb [Chorus] Oh, crimson king, oh sing Sing the tales of reign and sorrow
Well, on second thought, the real band didn’t always make that much of an effort.
I then decided to take a poem or two of my own and turn them to(wards) music. But the machine didn’t want giant swathes of lyrics, so I took a silly little observation from last week and bunged that into the furnace. You see, on the way to watch the poet Peter Bakowski, I saw someone wearing a “Who Farted?” T-shirt. And then, either brilliantly, or just bizarrely, or probably both, I heard them fart as I walked by. Bakowski’s a big fan of the aphorism, and of other very short poems. And just everday observations using plain, clear language. So with his poetic blessing if you like, I engineered that wee scene into a poem:
The man in the “Who Farted?”
T-shirt just farted. Which is
either meta, or it isn’t. But there’s
no question. It fucking stinks
And then, a week later, I gave Udio permission to engineer it into a trap/hip-hop song snippet:
So, behold the magic. Udio took my words from The Parable of the Man in the “Who Farted?” T-shirt and created something called “Urban Reflections”
You can do much better than that, with either your own lyrics, or the auto-generated ones that Udio will pluck from several ethers. You and Udio can make (sweet sweet) instrumental music together. You can create imaginary film scores. You can get it to rap about the banality of it all, or write a homily about David Seymour. (But in the end those two suggestions might be the same thing actually).
As with ChatGPT or anything of the ilk, it’s about your time at the wheel too. It’s about how good you want to get with the prompts. It’s about whether you see it as actual collaboration. Or whether you don’t much see the point at all.
I didn’t. As you can tell. Or even as you can hear, if you’re brave enough to click on that link above…
But I’m not put off by this. Does it bother me that the world — soon — won’t much tell the difference between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ music. We’ve had so many fake bands for so many years, from Milli Vanilli to Pussycat Dolls, and all the way back to The Archies, and well, whatever else. Most of the Netherworld Dancing Toys didn’t actually play on their hit. Same with many of The Beach Boys on many of theirs. Do we need to go down some weird rabbit-holes of relitigation out of some unctious iteration of paranoia? I hope not, as I barely even understand that sentence I just wrote.
Music might mean a whole lot to you — if you’re reading this on the regular I feel like that’s already a clue. But you have to remember that music is background for most people. And sometimes it’s not even that. It’s time/place, and it’s the soundtrack to the party, or it’s not. And I don’t actually mind if we lose even more of that into the cultural black holes. I’m secure in what I have, and what I know — in terms of my interests. I’m forever curious, and to worry that something like this is the death, is really to push a panic button way too early. The reality, I’m sure, is you can just carry on as you were. Or you can dive into the new world for a wee explore.
Your favourite band will still be around in some shape. And you’ll still be able to listen to their music in some way. What is the actual issue? That you like an AI band one day? And, what? Is that the same as shacking up with an AI partner or something? And just because someone does that, is it suddenly the point that you have to too?
I didn’t think so.
I reckon it’ll all be okay in the end. If it isn’t — then it’s not the end. Right? That’s how it goes.
I keep thinking about one of Brian Eno’s quotes from his diary, A Year With Swollen Appendices.
He is talking about the allure of failure in art, and old technologies. He says:
“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.”
And I think of this in relation to me now regularly listening to CDs, more than any other medium for music-delivery. That hadn’t been the case for at least a decade, and overnight it snuck up and folded itself right back into the mix. I have even let cassette tapes back in. And I sure didn’t expect that of myself.
So, I’ll let AI Music fail a bit more on its own — and without my help. And then maybe it’ll suddenly seem interesting.
Incidentally, there’s a story to the hideous images that accompany today’s newsletter. It’s a When In Rome situation of talking about AI music and using Udio, so I returned to DALL-E to make the images.
You’ll see from the captions my prompts for each iteration and sometimes the response from DALL-E, so sure it’s doing the best job possible.
But these are in reverse-chronology of how they arrived. I have spent about as much time having AI images made with my prompts as I have used AI to make music. It’s not (really) for me. And I do it without (actual) intention.
I’d heard some stories of AI imagery being racist. But I was not prepared when I made what I thought was a pretty funny joke: AI Music Poster for a very bad rap act call So-So Udio. You get the reference. Phil Collins. It’s a good joke. I don’t care if you don’t think so. As with many other things, I know the truth. Anyway, fuck, it spat out these images you’ve seen above, and that’s because I asked it to please make the poster include a mixed race duo, I then specifically asked for a white girl to be added, just because I was curious to see how the AI would add these elements. As you can see, it struggled to correctly “hype” So-So Udio’s debut single, Urban Reflections. None of it is really clear at all actually.
But the original poster image is most certainly racist. Hence my immediate prompt to “make it less racist looking” — which takes us back to that top image. Which doesn’t entirely manage that task, I would say. But is a lot less incriminating than how things all started:
Right, moving on. Here’s this week’s playlist.
Pretty sure there’s no AI music in there.
And there won’t be any AI music from me personally tonight. Dirty Spoons is playing at Vogelmorn as part of a busy line-up.
And finally, if you need something (more) to wash the taste of all of this nonsense from your musical palette, do check out Chaka Khan’s Tiny Desk set. It’s yet another example of everything that’s good about live performance, and a cool band, a unique singer, and a bloody great body of work:
Happy Friday. Happy listening. Thanks for reading. And let me know any of your thoughts about any of this below…
