Return To Port Silo

I was looking at my stats this afternoon, something I very rarely do any more, when I noticed something odd. This year, which is as far back as I looked, posts about music or AI or the two together seem to be getting slightly more attention than posts on gaming. 

Portmanteau posts, the grab-bags where I jam in whatever I've got lying around, also seem to be doing a bit better than average, regardless of whether they cover games or not. What aren't going as well are posts about specific games, unless the game happens to be one that's in the news at the time, like Defiance or Stars Reach. And even then, I need to put the name of that game in the title to see an uptick in views.

Bottom of all, and quite consistently so, come posts about Wuthering Waves. Even posts about EverQuest II do a little better, although admittedly not by much. That does seem odd, considering WW has millions of players and EQII probably barely makes six figures but I guess it's hardly surprising not many Wuthering Waves fans are into long-form blogs, let alone ones as obscure as mine.

At this stage, I really should clarify that the so-called "statistics" I'm referring to are the ones I see next to each post in the Blogger console itself. I long ago gave up even opening the emails Google sends me, telling me I should break out the bubbly because I had "800 clicks in 28 days" and I never bothered to swap over to the newer version of Google Analytics when the old one died.

Supposedly, those eight hundred monthly "clicks" come solely from Google Search, whereas the order of magnitude higher page views, generally settling somewhere between 200-300 per post after a couple of weeks, reflect the number of times someone has loaded the page in a browser, regardless of how they got there. (That explanation, by the way, comes from ChatGPT because I've never been able to find a clear, straightforward explanation anywhere else. Treat it with the caution it deserves.)

However the page views are tallied, as Wilhelm often says, even bad data can be useful if the source is consistent (Well, something like that...). I guess on that basis I can say some of the posts I thought were self-indulgent and of interest only to me might well have been of at least some interest to others, quite possibly more so than the gaming posts I used to assume were the main reason people came here. 

Good news for me, I guess. The blog has always reflected my current interests and I'd like to keep it that way. For a long time that meant all MMORPGs all the time here but  my main leisure activity was playing MMORPGs but I'm just not putting in the same hours any more. I still like to write about the games I do play and the ones I'm interested in but if I'm honest, I get a lot more excited about other things right now.

Anyway, that's a long pre-amble to what I hope is going to be a fairly short post (Spoiler: It wasn't!) on what I've been up to these last few days. I'm sure it won't surprise anyone reading this to hear I've been fiddling around with Suno some more but the exact details may not be quite what you'd expect. Not what I was expecting, that's for sure.

As I wrote the other day, the AI got an update, which gave me a burst of fresh interest. I was looking forward to trying the new model but the problem was I'd already made far too many versions of the thirty or so original songs I had available. I knew I probably ought to start over again and run the whole lot through the upgraded model but fun thought that might be, it knew it wouldn't be nearly as much fun as creating some entirely new ones.

Except I didn't have any new songs. In the fifteen or so years I was musically active I doubt I wrote more than fifty altogether. The ones I haven't used by now got left out for very good reasons. They're no good. Embarrassing, some of them. Possibly actionable. You really don't want to know...

That only left me one choice; write some new ones. Except that's really not as easy as it sounds. You do kind of have to have an idea, just to get started and I stopped having ideas for songs in the late 1980s. 

I strongly believe there's a very, very good reason nearly all good songs are written by people who... well, who aren't old. There are exceptions, of course, but even those rare songwriters who still turn out good work in their later years rarely eclipse or even equal the songs they wrote when they were young, when everything just mattered so much more. It gets harder to take all those desperate emotions seriously after you've felt them a thousand times. Or harder to convey them to others, anyway.

So, if I was too old to write any new songs and I'd run out of old ones, what was I going to do? I'm so glad you asked!

Remember five years ago, when I posted a couple of fragments of fiction from my apazine days? No. I thought not. I'd forgotten it myself until, for whatever mysterious reason (I have genuinely forgotten how it came about, even though it was only the day before yesterday.) I ended up looking at it again. And as I was reading it, finding myself surprised by it once again and thinking how I definitely wouldn't be able to write anything like it now, I had an idea.

What if I cut it up and turned it into song lyrics? I mean, there's a grand tradition of that sort of thing in rock music, isn't there? Well, there's Moonage Daydream... although I never did like that one all that much... and Kurt Cobain apparently did it too. (And Thom Yorke but I'm going to pretend I didn't know about that.)

This wouldn't be full-on cut-ups, anyway. Leaving Port Silo is a coherent narrative (Oh yes, it is!). I could take a few, short sections, change them as little as possible. Just reframe the prose as lyrics, switch a few things around here and there to make it scan. Maybe add a line or two to build some structure...

It certainly helped that the prose style is imagistic, non-syntactical interior monologue. It comes as close to poetry as prose and poetry is first cousin to song lyrics. So, is that second cousins or once-removed? Close enough for rock and roll, anyway.

I wasn't really expecting much if I'm honest. At best I'd have the words but words aren't songs. The lyrics are important, sure, but you have to have a tune. 

Suno would have been more than happy to come up with a tune, of course. An infinite number of tunes. Two problems with that.

First off, in my experience, Suno's own tunes aren't all that great. Second and more important, for me at least, the whole Making Music Using AI As An Instrument trick only works if I feel like it's me doing most of the creative work. There's a huge, existential difference between hearing an AI turn the song in your head into an actual song coming out of the speakers and listening to some words you wrote being sung to a melody you never thought of.

Only way to find out if something works is to try it, though, right? So I picked a couple of paragraphs and got to work. 

When I had something that looked like a song lyric, I read it through a few times to see if I could hear the music playing. And I could, if faintly. So I messed about with it some more, moved a few things about, tried some tentative vocal runs, whistled a few melodies... then I recorded a guide vocal and uploaded it.

I wasn't expecting a lot. I got a lot more than I expected. This is what I got, first time out:

 

 

Those may or may not sound good to you but let's just say I was extremely happy with the results. Although not so happy I didn't try a whole bunch of times to do it again only better still, if only because neither of the first two versions follows the lyrics exactly. 

Unfortunately, neither did any of the others. Why, I have no idea. It's never happened before or not to that extent, anyway. The odd word, sure. Whole verses missing? Never! I wonder if it has something to do with the structure, which doesn't conform at all closely to the conventional pop/rock song format? Or maybe it was all the repetition confused the AI, the way someone will trick a computer into considering a paradox in an old movie, to make the reel-to-reel tapes catch fire. 

I did eventually get one take that had all the words in the right order but it wasn't as vibrant as the first two and I prefer those by a long way, so clearly style really does beat content, the way we all know it does, if we're honest with ourselves. Still, it would be best to have both. Not being able to get the AI to redo the same version to correct its mistakes is possibly Suno's weakest point just now. 

The first run was so overwhelmingly successful, so much more than I expected, I spent the next two days doing pretty much nothing else. I've finagled four songs out of those two prose fragments so far and all of them are good or at least I like them a lot. So does Suno, apparently. I've got some cracking versions already. 

I'm not sure how many more songs I can dig out of the two short fragments but I'm happy to push it as far as it'll go. I always loved those Leaving Port Silo, which is why, when I found a way to recover all my old fiction from floppy discs back in 2020, it was what I chose to publish here. I never had much of a clue what to do witit , though. The two pieces were only ever meant to be fragments. We used to write a lot of fragments back in the apazines. No-one really felt the need to finish anything.

Now I finally know what it's going to be: a bunch of sonically and thematically linked songs. The big thing about songs as opposed to stories is they can be purely impressionistic and still carry a narrative. They don't need plots. I was always really bad at plots. 

Anyway, that's what I've been up to and what I'm likely to go on being up to for a while. I'll watch my Blogger stats on this post with interest. 

 

Notes on AI used in this post:

The music, obviously.  

Three images, all produced at NightCafe. The first two use the same model, good old Flux Schnell, my go-to. They also use the same prompt, three lines from the lyric  ("Walking through corn fields/Covered in dust/Lost in this dustbowl) plus a style note ("young female figure, old, worn clothing, line art, color, retro-futurism")

The only difference between the two is that the first one was generated using the "Short" duration and the second used "Long". I'm not remotely convinced I can tell the difference, which is concerning because the Long one costs twice as much. Apart from adding those weird hairy semicircles and tubular husks, neither of which I asked for or wanted, everything else looks about the same. I like both images but the first is by a distance the better, which is why it got the prime spot at the top of the post. 

The slightly worrying thing is that, whatever I used to think the unnamed girl in Leaving Port Silo looked like, now she looks like the girl in picture one. An unrecognized danger of using AI, that is. You may find it knows your mind better than you do.

For the the third picture I gave Gemini the full lyrics to the song and asked it for "a prompt for a generative AI image that would produce a suitable illustration for the cover of a vinyl album featuring this song". I did that because I was already there, trying to teach Gemini to mimic the prose style I used in the original fragment. After a few tries it was getting better at it but that's a post of its own...

Gemini took an extraordinarily long time thinking about the prompt. I was expecting something lengthy, verbose and highly detailed, like the ones it gives me for Suno, but in the end all it spat out was this: "Image Prompt: Dusty fields, a lone figure walking away from a desolate town, vinyl album cover".  I was not impressed. 

I was even less impressed when I handed that prompt over to one of the Pro models at NightCafe. I used one of my five free Pro credits to generate an image using HiDream1Dev and the results were disappointing. For a start, the central figure is clearly walking towards the town, not away from it. Also, she seems to have quite short legs. Not unnaturally short but her proportions look a little odd.