Eurythmic AI

 

 

In the Tin Pan and Brill Building era, very often ideas for songs came from title ideas and typically became the chorus.

Tell It Like It Is is/was a popular song,  now recorded by 7 artists. It's emblazoned on (most of) our brains at this point. But imagine "tell it like it is" was a phrase that was simply in the flow of something you were reading or something someone said. What would be the music in it as a lyric line? The one we know is in 12/8 but it can be done in a square 4/4. How would you sing or rap it?

The rhythm as we know it, including the pick-up bar and 4/4 versions:

How would AI interpret the phrase? It probably wouldn't be in 12/8. We can "train" it to understand swing feels and include them in the results. But AI will never get eurythmics because it isn't embodied, even if AI runs inside the body of a robot because the rhythm is loose and varied. What's always interesting about AI is the uncanny valley, in this case, trying to swing and not being able to--just as some humans can't. Also, whose copyrighted music are we using?