Some Puppy Walking

Beryl the dog is three and a half years old now, give or take. Since she was very first allowed to go out of the house, after her puppy shots had done whatever it is they do, she's been going to stay with our friend every second Saturday morning, which is the only time both Mrs Bhagpuss and I are both at work at the same time.

Yesterday, said friend gave us a copy of all the old videos and photos she took of Beryl back when she was little. It was a lot!

I've just had a look through them all and it seemed like it would save me the trouble of writing a post be fun to put one up on the blog. 

My first choice was one of Beryl chewing her lamby, a teething ring shaped (Vaguely.) like a lamb that she still very occasionally plays with. I picked that one mostly because it was one of the few in landscape format.

Obviously, my next thought was music. In Ye Olden Dayes I'd have had to look around for a suitable song, which would be fun but would probably have taken me most of the rest of the day. 

Thanks to the magic of world-destroying AI, and at the mere expense of all future life on the planet, it's now simplicity itself to generate a suitable three-minute backing track to go with a three-year old video of a dog going for a walk, to post on a blog that maybe at most a couple of hundred people will ever see, most of whom will never even bother to watch the video, while half of even those few that do will most likely turn the sound down so they don't have to listen to it.

I mean, that's a fair trade-off, isn't it? 

So I went to Suno, copy-pasted a prompt I'd used a few times to fair success, set the option to "Instrumental" (Because if there's one thing I really don't want Suno doing, it's writing any of its terrible lyrics...), named the track "Puppydog Chewtoy" and let the AI get on with it.

The first pair were awful. I'd foolishly but intentionally left the sliders at default (50% Weirdness, 50% Style Influence). I thought it might be "interesting". I was wrong. It might as well say "Do you want to listen to this or shall I put it straight in the trash?". Which is what I did.

I reset the sliders to what I always use for my own songs - 0% Weirdness, 100% Style Influence. (When I'm uploading my own stuff there's a third slider for Audio Influence, which I also set at 100% so as to have the singer follow my exact melody and phrasing, instead of trying to impersonate Mariah Carey or the frontman of some hair metal band, which seems to be the AI's happy place. And even then I often have to add "No shrieking, yelling, diva performances" in the verboten box.)

The second version was infinitely superior. Well, one of the two takes, anyway. I know tastes vary but I can listen to this kind of two chord lo-fi chugging for literally hours at a stretch. I could do without the drummer going batshit crazy on the crash cymbals every minute or so but it's a small price to pay for the satisfaction of the churn before and after.

I fired up good old Windows Movie Maker, which still does a job even though I have plenty of better options, loaded in the clip, added the music and... it was way too short. The tune is a second shy of five minutes. The clip was fifty seconds. 

I tried adding a couple more clips but it didn't really work and anyway it was getting to be too much like work so I had a rethink. The longest clip was also one of the best so I loaded that instead and tried again. 

And stap me if the music wasn't an all but perfect fit. Serendipity is king. Or queen. Or non-gender-specific regal rank. Twice as long as it needed to be but that was fine. I just faded it in and out and bingo! Done. 

I was going to host it directly on Blogger, for which there's an option that I rarely use. Now I remember why. It has a 100Mb limit. This was only just over the limit but rather than fiddle about with it to get it dow to size, I just uploaded it to my YouTube channel and linked it from there. (Beryl actually has her own YouTube channel but I'd have had to change Google IDs and all sorts so I pretended I'd forgotten about it.) Also, the tune now had a totally irrelevant name but I fixed that by calling it something entirely different when I uploaded it.

I think it turned out pretty well for a half-assed, low-effort, slacker affair. And now you can enjoy it, too. If you like puppies. And soulless, generic indie drone-rock made by robots.

But who doesn't, eh?  

 

Notes On AI Used In This Post

Just the music, made as described. 

The full prompt was "Lo-fi indie drone-pop with dreampop influences layered with simple drums and quiet drone bass, Stacked fuzzed guitars, soaked in rich drone effects, create a dense, evolving texture with dual vocals, twin vocals, two singers, rich timbre baritone male vocals, soft, cute female vocals float delicately above,"  

As you can see, for an instrumental, most of that is doing nothing at all. I was just too lazy to take it out (And curious to see if Suno would add humming or wordless vocals. It did not, sadly.)

After the first truly awful results I also added the negative prompt "lounge, loungecore, easy listening". In my experience, Suno frequently completely ignores negative prompts. Sometimes I think asking it not to do something actively encourages it. In this case, though, it worked. No hint of loungecore to be heard.