AI Music Process

 

As I've been using AI to generate music, the process seems to be as follows: Initial idea from an existing lyric line (perhaps inspired by something I'm reading in a book or article), find the music in the words, engage in wordplay, notate the rhythms (wordrums), find new meaning in the ambiguity, create a verse or chorus, choose a style/genre, generate iterations, write more lyrics against the results, re-generate, chose iterations that work (curate), play along with the music, transcribe the music, write string arrangements, create other versions based on it. If you are aware of the process, then you can flow with it. Ultimately, it's not just generated music--it becomes a generative process where one idea leads to another. Using AI music is simply an access point, where the means are justifying an end (your central idea). [I'm with David Lynch on this: you must have a central idea--even if it gets changed along the way]. This is essentially the definition of a "tool". The use of it "justifies" the results. If you want to slice a tomato, a serrated knife is the tool. The corollary would be that AI is one of the knives I might use to get results that I find satisfying. 

AI music is also an interesting tool for irony, used to marry visuals to music. The music may become secondary in the process, but you can move it up by doing musical things, like arranging it for actual instruments. In the end, it won't matter whether AI was used to make it, any more than certain knives were used, although tools require skill in using them as well, which affects the results. 

David Lynch:

"We don’t do anything without an idea. So they’re beautiful gifts. And I always say, you desiring an idea is like a bait on a hook — you can pull them in. And if you catch an idea that you love, that’s a beautiful, beautiful day. And you write that idea down so you won’t forget it. And that idea that you caught might just be a fragment of the whole — whatever it is you’re working on — but now you have even more bait. Thinking about that small fragment — that little fish — will bring in more, and they’ll come in and they’ll hook on. And more and more come in, and pretty soon you might have a script — or a chair, or a painting, or an idea for a painting."