AI and Lyric-Writing

 

When I generate AI music from lyrics, they are usually in a provisional state throughout the process. 

There was a lyric I was working on recently that contained a factual error, which I caught later on. At that point, the music was where I wanted it to be, but the error was the fly in the ointment. The question becomes, do you keep it as-is and include a "footnote" about the error and other vocal flubs or "mechanical hacks", or do you keep regenerating it until you get a piece of music that works? With a real vocalist, you can ask them to do another take with corrected lyrics.

The lyric at issue was “anonymous artists from Banksy to Pak”. Pak isn't an anonymous artist, but his name is conveniently one syllable and works rhythmically. When I chose a different artist name (Blu), the music that was generated after that point wasn't as good as the original version. I could change "anonymous artists" to "pseudonymous artists" but that's clunky and difficult to sing and has probably never been used in a lyric.

The larger question is whether I want a "casino creativity" in which composing becomes more like playing a slot machine. Eventually, you’ll win, but how long are you willing to play the game? I will admit that there can be a payoff when you like the results.  Kris Kristofferson croaking lyrics about NFT artists, minimalist white cubes, and Vantablack with a Morricone vibe--fantastic...

Regardless of how generative AI is uncreative, perhaps there is still a randomness at play. On one of the iterations, a particular vibrato on the word "machine" sounded like a machine and was an amusing happy accident. But a long "e" when sung with a vibrato will actually sound like that.

There are also some lyrics that simply cannot be sussed by AI, no matter how many times you try. It can generate jazz, but it doesn't understand swing or syncopation, or its version of it is strangely artificial. 

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In retrospect, I think it’s okay to make up a story after you thought you’ve already told it. Very often with lyric-writing it’s all wordplay. Once you think you have a final lyric and you (kinda) know the story, it might become clearer over time. It tells you some of the things you might have been trying to say. Sometimes you have to trust that what seems to be nonsense can eventually gather meaning. It’s important for artists to ultimately clarify it to the extent that it can be communicated. In the end, you can say, “that’s what I’m saying”. 

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All the versions--so far. The beauty of AI is that you can keep tweaking the lyrics, and in the process, also experiment with different genre treatments:

 

On the "apperaing not to do it" line: 

From a 2003 Kirk Varnedoe lecture: "Warhol wants to press on the nerve of abstraction made easy, on the idea that what abstraction requires in order for us to have faith in it is some sense of skill or effort. This is exactly where he wants to plant the knife and twist. His paintings seem to trivialize the idea of invention, of individuality. And yet he found, as I suggested in comparisons to Sigmar Polke and Frank Stella, sneaky ways of getting a certain painterliness back into the extremely dry and reductive art he practiced. He made an entire series of camouflage paintings in 1982 in which he found a backdoor route to the biomorphic surrealist language of Hans Arp, Miro and Calder. His Rorschach pictures—huge, four-meter-high paintings of 1984—resonate with the scale and bravado of something they are truly not, say a Franz Kline or a Robert Motherwell. The whole idea of doing something while appearing not to do it is perfectly likable to Warhol".]

"Comparison machine" is our mammalian brain always comparing ourselves to others .