Tag: music

• A Little Slop Music

  September 19, 2025

  The AI experiment that turned my ick to 11 (now you can try it too!)

  When I sit at the piano I’m struck by a simple paradox: twelve repeating keys are both trivial and limitless. The layout is simple; mastery is not. A single key sets off a chain — lever, hammer, string, soundboard. The keyboard is the interface that controls an intricate deeper mechanism.

  The computer keyboard can be just as musical. You can sequence loops, dial patches, sample and resample, fold fragments into new textures, or plug an instrument in and hear it transformed a thousand ways. It’s a different kind of craft, but it’s still craft.

  Generative AI has given me more “magic” moments than any other technology I’ve tried: times when the interface fell away and something like intelligence answered my inputs. Images, text, sounds appearing that felt oddly new: the assemblage transcending its parts. Still, my critical brain knows it’s pattern-play: signal in noise.

  AI-generated music feels different, though.

  In exploring AI, music, and ethics after the Velvet Sundown fallout, a colleague tasked students with building fictional bands: LLMs for lyrics and backstory, image and video generators for faces and promo, Suno for the music. Some students leaned into the paratexts; the musically inclined pulled stems apart and remixed them.

  Inspired, I tried it myself. And, wouldn’t you know, the experience produced a pile of Thoughts. And not insignificantly, a handful of Feelings.

  

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  Ritual-Technic: Conjuring a Fictional AI Band

  1. Start with the sound

  • Start with loose stylistic prompts: “lofi synth jazz beats,” “Scandi piano trio,” “psychedelic folk with sitar and strings,” or whatever genre-haunting vibe appeals.
  • Generate dozens (or hundreds) of tracks. Don’t worry if most are duds — part of the ritual is surfing the slop.
  • Keep a small handful that spark something: a riff, a texture, an atmosphere.

  2. Conjure the band

  • Imagine who could be behind this sound. A trio? A producer? A rotating collective?
  • Name them, sketch their backstories, even generate portraits if you like.
  • The band is a mask: it makes the output feel inhabited, not just spat out by a machine.

  3. Add the frame

  • Every band needs an album, EP, or concept. Pick a title that sets the mood (Just North of Midnight, Spectral Mixtape Vol. 1, Songs for an Abandoned Mall).
  • Create minimal visuals — a cover, a logo, a fake gig poster. The paratexts do heavy lifting in conjuring coherence.

  4. Curate the release

  • From the pile of generations, select a set that holds together. Think sequencing, flow, contrasts — enough to feel like an album, not a playlist.
  • Don’t be afraid to include misfires or weird divergences if they tell part of the story.

  5. Listen differently

  • Treat the result as both artefact and experiment. Notice where it feels joyous, uncanny, or empty.
  • Ask: what is my band teaching me about AI systems, creativity, and culture?

  ---

  Like many others, I’m sure, it took me a while to really appreciate jazz. For the longest time, for an ear tuned to consistent, unchanging monorhythms, clear structures, and simple chords and melodies, it just sounded like so much noise. It wasn’t until I became a little better at piano, but really until I saw jazz played live, and started following jazz musicians, composers, and theorists online, that I became fascinated by the endless inventiveness and ingenuity of these musicians and this music.

  This exploration, rightly, soon expanded into the origins, people, stories, and cultures of this music. This is a music born of pain, trauma, struggle, injustice. It is a music whose pioneers, masters, apprentices, advocates, have been pilloried, targeted, attacked, and abused, because of who they are, and what they were trying to express. Scandinavian jazz, and European jazz in general, is its own special problematic beast. At best, it is a form of cultural appropriation, at worst, it is an offensive cultural colonialism.

  Here I was, then, conjuring music from my imaginary Scandi jazz band in Suno, in the full knowledge that even this experiment, this act of play, brushes up against both a fraught musical history, as well as ongoing debates and court cases on creativity, intellectual property, and generative systems.

  Play is how I probe the edges of these systems, how I test what they reveal about creativity, culture, and myself. But for the first time, the baseline ‘ickiness’ I feel around the ethics of AI systems became almost emotional, even physiological. I wasn’t just testing outputs, but testing myself: the churn of affect, the strangeness in my body, the sick-fascinated thrill of watching the machine spit out something that felt like an already-loaded form of music, again and again. Addictive, uncanny, grotesque.

  It’s addictive, in part, because it’s so fast. You put in a few words, generate or enter some lyrics, and within two minutes you have a functional piece of music that sounds 80 or 90% produced and ready to do whatever you want with. Each generation is wildly different if you want it to be. You might also generate a couple of tracks in a particular style, enable the cover version feature, and hear those same songs in a completely different tone, instrumentation, genre. In the midst of generating songs, it felt like I was playing or using some kind of church organ-cum-starship enterprise-cum-dream materialiser…. the true sensation of non-stop slop.

  What perhaps made it more interesting was the vague sense that I was generating something like an album, or something like a body of work within a particular genre and style. That meant that when I got a surprising result, I had to decide whether this divergence from that style was plausible for the spectral composer in my head.

  But behind this spectre-led exhilaration: the shadow of a growing unease.

  AI-generated music used to only survive half-scrutiny: fine as background noise, easy to ignore. They still can be — but with the right prompts and tweaks, the outputs are now more complex, even if not always more musical or artistic.

  If all you want is a quick MP3 for a short film or TikTok, they’re perfect. If you’re a musician pulling stems apart for remixing or glitch experiments, they’re interesting too — but the illusion falls apart when you expect clean, studio-ready stems. Instead of crisp, isolated instruments, you hear the model’s best guesses: blobs of sound approximating piano, bass, trumpet. Like overhearing a whole track, snipping out pieces that sound instrument-like, and asking someone else to reassemble them. The seams show. Sometimes the stems are tidy, but when they wobble and smear, you catch a glimpse of how the machine is stitching its music together.

  The album Just North of Midnight only exists because I decided to make something out of the bizarre and queasy experience of generating a pile of AI songs. It exists because I needed a persona — an artist, a creative driver, a visionary — to make the tension and the weirdness feel bearable or justified. The composer, the trio, the album art, the biographies: all these extra elements, whether as worldbuilding or texture, lend (and only lend) a sense of legitimacy and authenticity to what is really just an illusion of a coherent, composed artefact.

  For me, music is an encounter and an entanglement — of performer and instrument, artist and audience, instrument and space, audience and space, hard notes and soft feel. Film, by contrast (at least for me), is an assemblage — sound and vision cut and layered for an audience. AI images or LLM outputs feel assemblage-like too: data, models, prompts, outputs, contexts stitched together. AI music may be built on the same mechanics, but I experience it differently. That gap — between how it’s made and how it feels — is why AI music strikes me as strange, eerie, magical, uncanny.

  So what’s at stake here? AI music unsettled me because it plays at entanglement without ever truly achieving it. It mimics encounter while stitching together approximations. And in that gap, I — perhaps properly for the first time — glimpsed the promise and danger of all AI-generated media: a future where culture collapses into an endless assemblage of banal, plausible visuals, sounds, and words. This is a future that becomes more and more likely unless we insist on the messy, embodied entanglements that make art matter: the contexts and struggles it emerges from, the people and stories it carries, the collective acts of making and appreciating that bind histories of pain, joy, resistance, and creativity.

  ---

  Listen to the album Just North of Midnight in its complete strangeness on SoundCloud.

• Unknown Song By…

  July 30, 2024

  

  A week or two ago I went to help my Mum downsize before she moves house. As with any move, there was a lot of accumulated ‘stuff’ to go through; of course, this isn’t just manual labour of sorting and moving and removing, but also all the associated historical, emotional, material, psychological labour to go along with it. Plenty of old heirlooms and photos and treasures, but also a ton of junk.

  While the trip out there was partly to help out, it was also to claim anything I wanted, lest it accidentally end up passed off or chucked away. I ended up ‘inheriting’ a few bits and bobs, not least of which an old PC, which may necessitate a follow-up to my tinkering earlier this year.

  Among the treasures I claimed was an innocuous-looking black and red USB stick. On opening up the drive, I was presented with a bunch of folders, clearly some kind of music collection.

  

  While some — ‘Come Back Again’ and ‘Time Life Presents…’ — were obviously albums, others were filled with hundreds of files. Some sort of library/catalogue, perhaps. Most intriguing, though, not to mention intimidating, was that many of these files had no discernible name or metadata. Like zero. Blank. You’ve got a number for a title, duration, mono/stereo, and a sample rate. Most are MP3s, there are a handful of WAVs.

  

  Cross-checking dates and listening to a few of the mystery files, Mum and I figured out that this USB belonged to a late family friend. This friend worked for much of his life in radio; this USB was the ‘core’ of his library, presumably that he would take from station to station as he moved about the country.

  Like most media, music happens primarily online now, on platforms. For folx of my generation and older, it doesn’t seem that long ago that music was all physical, on cassettes, vinyl, CDs. But then, seemingly all of a sudden, music happened on the computer. We ripped all our CDs to burn our own, or to put them on an MP3 player or iPod, or to build up our libraries. We downloaded songs off LimeWire or KaZaA, then later torrented albums or even entire discographies.

  With physical media, the packaging is the metadata. Titles, track listings, personnel/crew, descriptions and durations adorn jewel cases, DVD covers, liner notes, and so on. Being thrust online as we were, we relied partly on the goodwill and labour of others — be they record labels or generous enthusiasts — to have entered metadata for CDs. On the not infrequent occasion where we encountered a CD without this info, we had to enter it ourselves.

  

  This process ensured that you could look at the little screen on your MP3 player or iPod and see what the song was. If you were particularly fussy about such things (definitely not me) you would download album art to include, too; if you couldn’t find the album art, it’d be a picture of the artist, or of something else that represented the music to you.

  This labour set up a relationship between the music listener and their library; between the user and the file. The ways that software like iTunes or Winamp or Media Player would catalogue or sort your files (or not), and how your music would be presented in the interface; these things changed your relationship to your music.

  Despite the incredible privilege and access that apps like Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, and the like, offer, we have these things at the expense of this user-file-library relationship. I’m not placing a judgement on this, necessarily, just noting how things have changed. Users and listeners will always find meaningful ways to engage with their media: the proliferation of hyper-specific playlists for each different mood or time of day or activity is an example of this. But what do we lose when we no longer control the metadata?

  On that USB I found, there are over 3500 music files. From a quick glance, I’d say about 75% have some kind of metadata attached, even if it’s just the artist and song title in the filename. Many of the rest, we know for certain, were directly digitised from vinyl, compact cassette, or spooled tape (for a reel-to-reel player). There is no automatic database search for these files. Dipping in and out, it will likely take me months to listen to the songs, note down enough lyrics for a search, then try to pin down which artist/version/album/recording I’m hearing. Many of these probably won’t exist on apps like Spotify, or even in dingy corners of YouTube.

  A detective mystery, for sure, but also a journey through music and media history: and one I’m very much looking forward to.

• Elusive images

  May 2, 2024

  

  Up until this year, AI-generated video was something of a white whale for tech developers. Early experiments resulted in janky-looking acid dream GIFs; vaguely recognisable frames and figures, but nothing in terms of consistent, logical motion. Then things started to get a little, or rather a lot, better. Through constant experimentation and development, the nerds (and I use this term in a nice way) managed to get the machines (and I use this term in a knowingly reductive way) to produce little videos that could have been clips from a film or a human-made animation. To reduce thousands of hours of math and programming into a pithy quotable, the key was this: they encoded time.

  RunwayML and Leonardo.Ai are probably the current forerunners in the space, allowing text-to-image-to-(short)video as a seamless user-driven process. RunwayML also offers text-to-audio generation, which you can then use to generate an animated avatar speaking those words; this avatar can be yourself, another real human, a generated image, or something else entirely. There’s also Pika, Genmo and many others offering variations on this theme.

  Earlier this year, OpenAI announced Sora, their video generation tool. One assumes this will be built into ChatGPT, the chatbot which is serving as the interface for other OpenAI products like DALL-E and custom GPTs. The published results of Sora are pretty staggering, though it’s an open secret that these samples were chosen from many not-so-great results. Critics have also noted that even the supposed exemplars have their flaws. Similar things were said about image generators only a few years ago, though, so one assumes that the current state of things is the worst it will ever be.

  Creators are now experimenting with AI films. The aforementioned RunwayML is currently running their second AI Film Festival in New York. Many AI films are little better than abstract pieces that lack the dynamism and consideration to be called even avant-garde. However, there are a handful that manage to transcend their technical origins. But how this is not true of all media, all art, manages to elude critics and commentators, and worst of all, my fellow scholars.

  It is currently possible, of course, to use AI tools to generate most components, and even to compile found footage into a complete video. But this is an unreliable method that offers little of the creative control that filmmakers might wish for. Creators employ an infinite variety of different tools, workflows, and methods. The simplest might prompt ChatGPT with an idea, ask for a fleshed-out treatment, and then use other tools to generate or source audiovisual material that the user then edits in software like Resolve, Final Cut or Premiere. Others build on this post-production workflow by generating music with Suno or Udio; or they might compose music themselves and have it played by an AI band or orchestra.

  As with everything, though, the tools don’t matter. If the finished product doesn’t have a coherent narrative, theme, or idea, it remains a muddle of modes and outputs that offers nothing to the viewer. ChatGPT may generate some poetic ideas on a theme for you, but you still have to do the cognitive work of fleshing that out, sourcing your media, arranging that media (or guiding a tool to do it for you). Depending on what you cede to the machine, you may or may not be happy with the result — cue more refining, revisiting, more processing, more thinking.

  AI can probably replace us humans for low-stakes media-making, sure. Copywriting, social media ads and posts, the nebulous corporate guff that comprises most of the dead internet. For AI video, the missing component of the formula was time. But for AI film, time-based AI media of any meaning or consequence, encoding time was just the beginning.

  AI media won’t last as a genre or format. Call that wild speculation if you like, but I’m pretty confident in stating it. AI media isn’t a fad, though, I think, in the same ways that blockchain and NFTs were. AI media is showing itself to be a capable content creator and creative collaborator; events like the AI Film Festival are how these tools test and prove themselves in this regard. To choose a handy analogue, the original ‘film’ — celluloid exposed to light to capture an image — still exists. But that format is distinct from film as a form. It’s distinct from film as a cultural idea. From film as a meme or filter. Film, somehow, remains a complex cultural assemblage of technical, social, material and cultural phenomena. Following that historical logic, I don’t think AI media will last in its current technical or cultural form. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be on it right now: quite the opposite, in fact. But to do that, don’t look to the past, or to textbooks, or even to people like me, to be honest. Look to the true creators: the tinkerers, the experimenters, what Apple might once have called the crazy ones.

  Creators and artists have always pushed the boundaries, have always guessed at what matters and what doesn’t, have always shared those guesses with the rest of us. Invariably, those guesses miss some of the mark, but taken collectively they give a good sense of a probable direction. That instinct to take wild stabs is something that LLMs, even a General Artificial Intelligence, will never be truly capable of. Similarly, the complexity of something like, for instance, a novel, or a feature film, eludes these technologies. The ways the tools become embedded, the ways the tools are treated or rejected, the ways they become social or cultural; that’s not for AI tools to do. That’s on us. Anyway, right now AI media is obsessed with its own nature and role in the world; it’s little better than a sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey or Her. But like those films and countless other media objects, it does itself show us some of the ways we might either lean in to the change, or purposefully resist it. Any thoughts here on your own uses are very welcome!

  The creative and scientific methods blend in a fascinating way with AI media. Developers build tools that do a handful of things; users then learn to daisy-chain those tools together in personal workflows that suit their ideas and processes. To be truly innovative, creators will develop bold and strong original ideas (themes, stories, experiences), and then leverage their workflows to produce those ideas. It’s not just AI media. It’s AI media folded into everything else we already do, use, produce. That’s where the rubber meets the road, so to speak; where a tool or technique becomes the culture. That’s how it worked with printing and publishing, cinema and TV, computers, the internet, and that’s how it will work with AI. That’s where we’re headed. It’s not the singularity. It’s not the end of the world. it’s far more boring and fascinating than either of those could ever hope to be.

• Ziggy played guitar

  January 12, 2016

  

  I can’t remember precisely when I bought The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, but I can definitely remember the first time I listed to it all the way through. I was catching the train from Sydney to Melbourne for a wedding in 2006. I’d been a Bowie fan throughout my teenage years; any Queen fan naturally transitions to the Thin White Duke at some point. But listening to and absorbing such a perfectly-crafted, wonderfully rich album was a life-changer.

  Musically, it’s diverse. From blues to rock to old-school R&B, the album has all of it in spades, each track with its unique Ziggy-ish twist. And it’s spacey and druggy and rocky and everything in between. More than that, though, if you let the words and the music roll over you for the album’s length, it becomes a transcendent experience. Think of Major Tom, now returned to Earth and suffering the worst kind of comedown/depression; or better still, having flown through a wormhole (a la 2001: A Space Odyssey) and met the Starman himself. What kind of stories would they tell each other? What prophecies would Ziggy pass on? 11 prophecies in all, ranging in length from two five minutes, and making use of some of the most iconic musicians and styles and motifs of the era.

  Do yourself a favour and track down the D.A. Pennebaker-directed concert film of the album. This was another of those revelatory high school moments. It’s a top film in and of itself, capturing the persona of Ziggy in that signature grainy Pennebaker style, making the character seem grounded, real, if unapproachable and ethereal.

  It’s hard to describe how I’m feeling. Rumours had been circulating that Bowie was unwell for a decade or more, but he was a name, a figure, a character, that, despite removing himself from public life, was always so present. He was at the forefront of popular culture, not really giving a damn, for nearly half a century. I came to Bowie late, but I fell head over heels for the man, the music, the myth. Funny how culture, art, music in particular, can make you feel like you know someone. Suffice to say, there’s a hole in my heart today. Listening to the music dulls the ache, but it will take some time to heal.

  And he was alright, the band was altogether.
  Yes he was alright, the song went on forever.
  And he was awful nice,
  Really quite out of sight

• Whiplash (2014)

  October 20, 2015

  

  Richard Brody didn’t like Whiplash (2014).

  That’s fine. Critics, of all people, are certainly entitled to their opinion. And Richard Brody is by no means an unqualified critic. What Brody’s done here, though, is fundamentally misunderstand the thrust of the film he’s critiquing. It’s a trap that a great many critics fall into: thinking the film is about one thing, when it’s actually about something else, or a bunch of other things.

  ‘The movie’s very idea of jazz,’ writes Brody, ‘is a grotesque and ludicrous caricature.’ It certainly would be, if this was a film about jazz, rather than a jazz film.

  What on earth is a jazz film? Damn fine question. The notion came to me in one of the earlier scenes in Damien Chazelle’s film. Miles Teller’s Andrew leaves the Conservatory, heading home after thinking he’s failed to make the cut for the concert band. Amid the standard cutting of Andrew walking the streets between his school and his home, random shots show street lamps, illuminated windows, signage, traffic. This isn’t a standard contextualising montage between scenes – these are random shots interspersed with the character-centric frames.

  This random approach to cinematography and editing persists throughout the film – take the phenomenal final shots which obscure the subjects’ faces, and not the parts a cinematographer would normally mask.

  So while perhaps Chazelle is not glorifying jazz, the learning of music, or education more broadly, he is certainly contributing a jazz sensibility to the craft of cinema.

  Billy Crystal is quoted as saying ‘That’s the thing about jazz; it’s free-flowing, it comes from your soul.’ This idea works for Whiplash: not only is the flow of images free, but they all feel as though they came from some deep place.

  This is particularly appropriate given that this is not a film about music, or education, or history, or culture. This is a film about the systematic manipulation and mangled reconstruction of one soul by another.

  Whiplash is a staggering film, that I’ll struggle to get over. It’s a stellar character piece, and I feel that the claustrophobic intimacy of its dark story will haunt cinema for some years to come.