Cut-up 2025

 

Back in 1995, a few years before the advent of the internet, the Verbisizer was developed for David Bowie to create cut-up  lyrics, which he used on his Outside album. We can do the same thing now using large language models and chatbots to generate random lines from disparate data sets, then rearrange the lines in a musical way. I'm now using Google’s LLM software and Poe to generate lyrics from various sources. One of them is my lyric notebook which I've been keeping since about 1995, which has probably thousands of lines and couplets in it. I also use bits from my diary. The most recent piece which used this new cut-up is Watch The River, a mashup from three entries, one March 1, 2004 entry with some lyrics I jotted down ("moody music on cyberwaves"), a dream that I had on February 15, 2018 and another entry from January 4, 2025, as well as some random lines, namely, Brokedown Palace which is a poem by Robert Hunter and was a Grateful Dead song (as well as a film).

It’s also interesting how Google NotebookLM does a “deep dive” into my random notebook, essentially just an un-ordered list, as if it was written linearly. It's essentially extracting meaning from fragments, which is what the Verbisizer did, although it’s process was automatic, whereas mine is a manual selection of fragments and editing them.

As an experiment, I uploaded the lyric notebooks which I have been keeping over the past 25 years into the LLM and it generated a “deep dive” analysis of them. The notebooks are just a list of lyric lines and couplets that I capture when I think of them. The deep dive weaves a narrative through them which is kind of interesting. But essentially it's just a random list.