Musical Combines

 

Robert Rauschenberg, Short Circuit (Combine Painting), 1955

 

I once had an idea to make a portrait that was a bricolage of various print products that are available as digital printing options: wood, glass, aluminum, ceramic tiles, and title it OEM, as a reference to their generic manufactured quality. The equivalent in music would be to have each section in the song as one of these generic products. If you can't find a way for something to be taken seriously as a viable art form you resort to parody. In many ways parody is a higher form of art because it uses cleverness--something which has been used in art for millennia.

Here's an example of a recent work by me in the "Songday" series (a Book Of Days for songs) that has an AI-generated EDM outro (done with Mubert) that's almost like a "commercial". Using a visual art metaphor, the top part of the "artwork" is painted by hand, and the lower part (outro) is printed on a printer and affixed to the bottom as a kind of Rauchenbergian Combine. This is a way to use AI music as a found object, as Robert Rauschenberg would use a newspaper clipping or a piece of fabric. It's also a way to think visually about music. AI makes this more possible because you can use the same prompts to generate both the art and the music such that they're of a piece.

The video uses the bumper from an 80s episode of Secrets of the Unknown on tornadoes, as Blue Sequin Dress is based on a dream about a tornado that turned into a woman in a blue sequined dress. It works with the music right out of the box with almost no edits. It's an example of how I'm using AI music as one isolated element as opposed to the entire piece.

Working with new technologies is ideally a co-adaptation of old and new, and this is my current way of doing it. I want to avoid using AI music as a "coloring book" way of making art and use it more in this way as a collage element in an abstract non-literal way, and in a way that re-contextualizes both: it makes composed music seem like it was generated, and become "cameos" for each other. I could print the score for the piece and include it in a combine of some kind. You wouldn't know it was composed by me because it looks anonymous and generic. Another analogy is using an instrument in a way that it wasn't designed for, like a prepared piano, a prepared guitar, or an altered tuning, or using cathode ray tubes as Nam June Paik did. It also gives you the opportunity to riff on old media such as VCRs which is what we used to tape off TV broadcasts. They were still being used in 1997 when I had the dream. The blue on the "play" part of the tape was formerly known as "the blue screen of death" which fits in with the scary nature of tornadoes.