AI Songs

I came across this silly song today, Colors of the Lisp. At the bottom is a link to a youtube video of someone performing it. I don't mean to be rude to the singer; my opinion is that it's kind of a bad performance.

Taking a step back real quick, I think it's sort of a shame that most humans suck at singing (this definitely includes me) -- maybe most could be trained up to something approaching "not grating", if we all had time and inclination, but I don't know. In the past, I don't think it was any different either, most people were bad. But it mattered less, because you didn't have an endless supply of excellent music to listen to any time you wanted, so people sang more even if they weren't very good. And when singing in a group, even if there are a lot of bad singers, the whole sound plus the experience of the individuals can sort of make up for it.

Vocaloid has been around a while, I enjoy it. I also think the idea is implicitly accepted there: even if a singer sounds quite robotic, it's still a lot better than a random human giving an attempt.

AI music has been part of the generative AI fun over the last while. I don't listen to much of it, I've generated even less of it, but what's striking is how high the quality is. One of my favorites is this random song called Kitsune. (The original youtube link is no longer available, for some reason, but the... producer? is arabesque on bandcamp if it goes away again. There's some interesting meta-commentary to be done on the ephemeral nature of AI generated stuff.)

Part of why I haven't generated much is that every site wants you to have a freaking account. I'm sick of making accounts for everything, even if the friction is low. Just let me try your thing -- if I actually like it, and want to use it more than this once-off trial, then maybe I'll make an account. Another reason is that I just don't have a need. I think next time I make a game I might consider some BG music or even some effects made via gen AI tools rather than dinking with lmms and so on.

(I love and appreciate that there are repositories of royalty free tracks and so on, but much like stock 3D trees, when I notice them it takes me out of the thing. I know the creator cut corners here -- that's all well and fine, I cut corners when it makes sense to as well, all I'm saying is that even if the cut corners are perfectly justified and not at all a big deal, or even a minor deal, I still don't like to notice them. For my own stuff, I'd rather have something more unique, and AI is a great way to satisfy that constraint. In essence, cutting corners without making them as obvious. There's of course a potential problem when they are actually obvious, as so many default-dall-e-style AI images are, and I get the same feeling of "I don't like this" when I see one heading a blog post.)

I did find a site that lets me generate songs without signup. I can't feed it lyrics, but that's ok. The site is brev.ai. I gave it this prompt: "a song about the programming language Common Lisp to the tune of Colors of the Wind", it gave me these lyrics:

[Verse]
You think you own whatever code you land on
The functions and the macros all the same
But I know every cell and list and lambda
Has a spirit
Has a name

[Verse]
You think the only code that matters
Is syntax you can simply comprehend
But if you walk the path of nested parens
You'll learn things that you've never dreamt

[Chorus]
Have you ever looped with the elegance of Lisp
Or mapped a list with the ease of higher forms
Can you bind a var with let and let it exist
Or code the endless streams
In any storm

[Verse]
With macros you can shape the code so freely
Defining constructs
Bending time
With closures you preserve the state so neatly
Everything clicks
Everything aligns

[Verse]
How high can a recursive call keep climbing
If the stack's the only thing you fear
And how rare is the joy of cons so binding
When the elegant code appears

[Chorus]
Have you ever looped with the elegance of Lisp
Or mapped a list with the ease of higher forms
Can you bind a var with let and let it exist
Or code the endless streams
In any storm

Not bad, actually. Not amazing, but not bad.

It gave two 4-minute long "pop whimsical melodic" tracks. Here they are. (Bug me in the comments if you want to listen and the links have failed.)

Both songs actually should probably "end" a little after the two minute mark. Instead they both continue into an instrumental section and then repeat the last few stanzas (with weird bugs).

So of course both versions of the song have flaws, the requested tune isn't exactly there (but the backing music that is there is quite enjoyable anyway). The biggest flaws are only the sudden style changes in the voice and even sudden disappearance of any backing music at all during the section when it starts to repeat itself. "Endings" seem to be a common problem with these AI audio systems, whether video or text to speech, it'll get worked out.

Still, I like both a lot more than the performance of the human one.

I think there are sites that let you feed in your own precise lyrics. I think those are really cool, and it really enhances the enjoyment an individual can have from making up some fun lyrics and (not being able to perform them themselves, or even make backing music) hear them come to life. Don't really have any other conclusions.

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Posted on 2024-09-22 by Jach

Tags: artificial intelligence, lisp, personal, thought

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