Fake McCoys

 

 

Since I'm currently not interested in being in a band, I'm very interested in discovering bands and forming fake bands with AI. I find it incredibly interesting from a conceptual standpoint, and it has given musicians, or even the general public, the ability to do those kinds of things. As a musician, I see it as a separate "department" aside from my other things that I do in music, now involving going back and doing manual scoring. I see it as kind of a bookending of my musical abilities. 

AI generation is essentially a listener's activity. This is not uninteresting in itself, because as a musician, you have to have the ability to listen to and assess what's going on in the music on a micro level, almost imperceptibly. But the other part of music, at least for the last half-century or more, has been really more of a visual art. Once an album is done, the album art has to be created, which is also an interesting aspect that conceptualizes the whole piece. 

This latest AI-generated song has only four lines of lyrics. I like a pithy lyric because I can focus on production. In AI music, not only are you a listener, you're also a producer and curator. It's an interesting aspect of it that we're just now getting used to doing, and I like it very much. This band is a fictitious band called the Bunnys, an all-female band. Their new album would be one where they'd use four different producers. So I'm playing all those producer roles, simply by creating different prompts. In the “studio”, the “producer” would be guiding them in certain ways, using certain effects, and so on. 

I like the process of creating multiples using the same sets of lyrics, or lyrics that are slightly changed on each iteration. I've done this a number of times; one of them was a country album that had 10 different versions. 

You also get to play around with satire and irony. The whole thing is a fake, which is an interesting way to work as an artist, where you get to play roles. I got the idea for the name of the band from a series of screen prints made by the German artist Sigmar Polke, and had those images in mind as I was running the iterations. In the end, the representational image that I used was by the Chicago artist Ed Paschke, which appears to be a painting of Hitler, but I actually think it's somebody else, and he just used a black brush stroke to make it look like his mustache. I thought this was an interesting image that went with all the tracks. Imagery and visuals are a way to package the whole thing.

AI generation is a way to be an anonymous artist, but I choose not to be. I'd rather say it's me as an artist, like Ed Paschke, who is playing around with different characters and personas, and experimenting with how they work in a conceptual space. The fact that my name is on it has nothing to do with me trying to fake something, when in fact I am using fakery for the whole thing. It's better to say that you're being fake rather than trying to hide the fact. It's a way of making it pure artifice, which is what art is.

The next step would be to put that kind of a band together and re-write and re-produce the songs manually.

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LLM: "Discuss anonymity in art"