Songwriting With Jen

 

Years ago, I thought the Boomy app would be useful for generating song ideas, but they were too provisional to use out of the box. But songwriters can already generate ideas quickly--and perhaps too quickly, producing too many ideas. I generate them in myriad ways: titles, lines, couplets, alternate tunings, metaphors, strategies, or just noodling around on an instrument. Lately, I've generated ideas from the natural rhythms in language, which I call "wordrums", a portmanteau word I invented (word+drums) in which the rhythms of language are used as the rhythmic “groove” over which a melody and chords are mapped.
 
One of my "wordrum" pieces is Gabrielle, who was one of Renoir's models, and the text driving it was as follows:

7/2/1907, Tuesday (Paris) (Harry Kessler Diary)

Visited Renoir with Vollard this afternoon in Montmartre, rue Caulaincourt...Renoir sat on a rolling chair and painted a long, life-size blond nude, a replica of the nude at Gallimard’s. His black-haired model Gabrielle, in a loose yellow calico blouse...

The extracted "lyric":

Renoir sat on a rolling chair
And painted a life-size blonde
A replica of the nude at Gallimard’s
His black-haired Gabrielle
In a loose calico blouse

This is what I composed based on that "seed" idea:

 Gabrielle (String 'Shortet') by meta4s

 

Jen's idea is also an extraction, but too limited by its data set and generated something extremely cliche. Using Jen, I feel like I'm ordering lunch from an app. Using a prompt in the form of a food order, this is what it generated. It's interesting that it understood that the music would have a Hispanic feel.

I could see how Jen could be used to create a jingle for a commercial for a Mexican (or French bistro) restaurant, but not for songwriting, given the way music has been written and performed for centuries. Some app or website isn’t changing that as a human universal.