Don't You Know Who I Am?

Naithin posted something the other day about his experiences with the AI music generation app Suno, which I've been using for most of this year. As I said in the comment thread to his post, it's largely replaced playing video games for me, in the way playing games once replaced watching television. I very much doubt it'll hold my attention for more than two decades, the way MMORPGs did, but for now it's still feeling quite compulsive.

There's probably a whole series of posts I could write about various aspects of making music this way - practical, philosophical, aesthetic, ethical, legal - but not right now. Today I just thought I'd share an idea I had for a parlor game, to be played using your LLM of choice, an idea that only occurred to me last night as I was asking mine, which happens to be Gemini, a question.

Mostly, when I'm working with Suno, I make up my whole prompts from scratch. I do re-use a lot of them, often with certain key phrases changed, trying to finesse the exact result I'm after, but I'm not usually trying to re-create the signature sound of a specific band or singer, more the sounds I hear in my head.

Occasionally, though, I look at something I've written and wonder what it might sound like if it had been covered by someone I like. Or, for that matter, don't like. Even more occasionally I find myself wanting to make something that sounds entirely unlike anything I'd come up with on my own, both for inspiration and variety.

To that end, now and again, I go to Gemini and ask it to give me a prompt for Suno that describes how a particular genre or band sounds. Feed those into Suno unedited and the results aren't often all that close. You can always recognize the influences but it's not like you can copy and paste from one AI to another and pump out convincing ersatz albums by your favorite acts like some kind of amateur Top of the Pops knock-off operation. Well, not yet, anyway.

It would be an amusing party game to generate a bunch of those, play them and have people try to guess who they were supposed to be. I can imagine that being a lot of fun with enough drink taken. If I thought anyone would actually take the time to click through and listen, I might have knocked out a few myself and included them here.

But that would be a lot of work and I'd be surprised if more than a handful of readers would be interested enough to listen to even a few bars. That sort of thing really requires a bunch of people together in a room to be fun. 

What would be much easier and also a better game for a blog would be if I just copied and pasted a few of Gemini's prompts to see if anyone can recognize the acts from the descriptions.

Gemini is pretty good at describing what singers and bands sound like. Disturbingly good, actually. The shorthand explanation of how "LLMs work by analysing vast banks of data to ascertain the next most likely word" seems to collapse pretty quickly when you look at the results. Self-evidently, there's more to it than that, or the output wouldn't be so convincing. When I saw the descriptions I was getting, my first thought was that Gemini had to be precising a whole bunch of reviews and picking out the most commonly-expressed opinions but even if that's all it is doing, it's weirdly accurate.

What it mostly makes me think is that well-known bands and singers have such a definitive, known, recognizable style it can quite easily be encoded in a couple of paragraphs. A test of how accurate that encoding is might be to ask someone if they could tell the band from Gemini's description of what they sound like.

And if that's not a parlor game, I don't know what is.

Oh, one other thing. When I started doing this, Suno had a two-hundred character limit on prompts. That forced Gemini to be very succinct. I think those make for a better game, although they're far less interesting in themselves than the ones it puts up for the new thousand-character limit. Those are more like entries in a musical dictionary.

Shall we try a couple? Of course, there is the slight problem that some of the bands I may have been asking about aren't as well-known to the readership of this blog as they might be but we'll see how we go. Let's start with a few short ones, all of them pretty famous.

1. "Epic rock ballad, theatrical vocals, powerful piano, soaring melodies, dramatic drums. Over the top emotion."

 2. "Clanging percussion, gravelly vocals, bluesy growl, broken piano, dark carnival vibe. Storytelling song."

3.  "Dissonant blues, fractured rhythms, raw vocals, free jazz elements, odd time signatures. Experimental rock." (Gemini apologized before offering this one, saying "It's challenging to precisely replicate the uniquely abstract and complex sound of ------ within the constraints of a short Suno prompt."

 4. "Synth-pop, melancholic lyrics, electronic beat, dramatic vocals, catchy melody. 80s/90s dance-pop."

5. "Dark, narrative song, brooding vocals, piano/organ, gothic rock feel, intense atmosphere."

Answers, in classic magazine style, at the bottom of the page. Or better yet, click through the number to see the act in question in full flight on YouTube.

I think most of those are fairly easy to guess but it's always hard to tell, if you already know the answers. 

Much more intriguing and educational are the longer prompts. Some of these really made me think about the artists in question, sometimes in a different way to how I would usually have considered their work. Unfortunately, these are really too long to include more than a handful in a blog post and, more problematic still, most of the ones I've done have been for bands I wouldn't really expect anyone to get.

This, for example:

A blend of chamber pop and indie rock with dual vocals

Create a song with a delicate, chamber-pop feel. The melody should be intricate and pastoral, driven by acoustic guitar, cello, and oboe. The vocals should be a male-female duet, singing with a gentle, melodic, and slightly ethereal quality. The rhythm should be subtle and understated, possibly featuring soft, brushed drums. The overall mood should be whimsical and melancholic, like a folk-tale set to music, with a touch of art-pop sophistication

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Okay, that's Shellyan Orphan. And I think it's pretty close, except there's not always two of them singing. But speaking of duos...

This might be easier.

Duet: Psychedelic Cowboy Lounge

Create a psychedelic, country-lounge duet with a distinct male and female vocalist. The male voice should be a deep, world-weary baritone, delivered with a cool, nonchalant swagger. The female voice should be a soft, breathy, and slightly detached soprano. The music should have a lazy, sun-drenched feel, with a loping, cinematic rhythm. Instrumentation should feature twangy, reverb-drenched electric guitars, a prominent bassline that walks slowly and deliberately, and a gentle, brushed drum beat. The atmosphere should be both sultry and melancholic, like a slow-motion scene from a western film, with a sense of fatalistic romance and hazy desert heat."

Now that is eerily accurate, I'd say. It's Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra and I specifically asked for them "as they sounded on their version of Summer Wine." 

I was curious enough about the provenance to try googling individual phrases with Lee or Nancy's names to see if I could track down a specific review or article from which they'd been taken but there was nothing. However Gemini is doing it, lifting descriptions wholesale from published texts doesn't seem to explain it.

Now three more I won't immediately reveal. At least one is blindingly obvious, I'd say, and the other two are guessable if you're familiar with the fairly-famous acts in question, although on of the two was only really well-known in the UK.

Psychedelic Chamber Pop

Create a richly orchestrated, orchestral pop song with a sense of wistful innocence and profound introspection. The soundscape should be built on a foundation of lush vocal harmonies, layered meticulously like a choir. The instrumentation should be a kaleidoscopic mix of traditional rock instruments and unconventional sounds: think harpsichord, French horn, cello, and subtle, otherworldly electronic sounds like the theremin.

The production should feel like a "pocket symphony," with a dense, "Wall of Sound" quality where every instrument and vocal part is given its own space. The arrangement should be dynamic, with unexpected melodic and rhythmic shifts, moving between serene, introspective sections and soaring, anthemic choruses. The mood should be both joyful and deeply melancholic, capturing a feeling of bittersweet wonder. The song structure should be more like a suite, with distinct musical sections seamlessly spliced together to create a unified, emotional journey.

Dramatic Orchestral Pop

Create a dramatic, operatic pop song with a grand, majestic feel. The vocals should be a deep, resonant baritone, delivered with a formal, theatrical, and deeply melancholic tone. The orchestration should be lush and sweeping, featuring soaring strings, blaring horns, and a full choir. The melody should be stately and complex, with unexpected shifts and a sense of cinematic tension. The lyrics should be poetic, dark, and enigmatic, telling a story of romantic tragedy or existential dread. The overall sound should be one of epic grandeur, blending chanson and Broadway with a noir sensibility, creating a sophisticated and deeply moving soundscape."

Ornate Art Rock

Create a theatrical and eccentric art-rock song with a baroque pop feel. The vocals should be a hyper-dramatic, trembling vibrato, delivered with a campy, highly stylized theatricality. The melody should be intricate and somewhat ornate, with a prominent, crying violin and a lush, romantic piano. The rhythm section should be understated but propulsive, providing a dynamic backdrop for the more flamboyant elements. The sound should feel both raw and refined, combining the glam-rock energy with the delicate precision of a chamber orchestra. The atmosphere should be one of decadent, melancholic glamour, full of quirky flourishes and a sense of sophisticated playfulness."

That's enough for now. Also, it's most of the ones I've done. I said I didn't do it often.

I might do it more now I've realized what a good game it makes, though. And obviously it doesn't have to be music. You could get your pet LLM to give you a short description of an artist 

("Large-scale canvases featuring soft-edged, rectangular blocks of color that seem to float and radiate, aiming to evoke profound human emotions from the viewer" - Mark Rothko.) 

or a writer 

("gritty realism, complex world-building, and moral ambiguity. He uses a multi-protagonist, limited third-person perspective to tell an intricate, sprawling narrative where beloved characters can be killed off unexpectedly, reflecting the harsh, unpredictable nature of his fantasy world". - George R.R. Martin) 

or a game's art style

("a highly recognizable and influential stylized high-fantasy look. It is characterized by exaggerated proportions, vibrant colors, and hand-painted textures that prioritize readability and a timeless, "cartoonish" aesthetic over photorealism". - World of Warcraft)

Back in the eighties, when my pals and I used to sit around into the early hours making up exactly these sorts of games, this would have been iterated on over and over. The potential for making your own entertainment with AI is huge and if you ignore the drain on the environment it seems like one of the more harmless uses of the technology I can think of. 

I might be using it for my Advent Calendar this year. I have a few ideas... 

 

 

Answers down here for those with an aversion to hypertext.

 

 

 

 

A bit further

 

 

 

 

Here we go

 

 

 

 

 

1. Meatloaf

2. Tom Waits

3. Captain Beefheart

4. Pet Shop Boys

5. Nick Cave

 

Psychedelic Chamber Pop - The Beach Boys (Specifically God Only Knows and Good Vibrations.) 

Dramatic Orchestral Pop - Scott Walker

 Ornate Art Rock - Cockney Rebel.