Believe it or not, there's an AI program that creates new songs by dead artists because isn't that what we really want: bad, fake Kurt Cobain songs.
Now I could waste the next few minutes of your time pontificating on the value of such an enterprise-as the articles note, this was done as an example of "what if" they, Cobain, Hendrix, Winehouse, hadn't died early-but I think what's more interesting, at least to me, is how this could help aging types, like me, milk out more songs, that quite frankly might be better than anything I could come up with myself.
In fact, think of the potential across the musical board!
Why waste time trying to recreate a particularly period in your musical history when you can get your computer to do it for you? Sweet, huh? Some of it might even be sorta, kinda good. A bonus. Because, let's be honest, writing and crafting a new song is a lot of work, and sometimes it goes nowhere, or even worse, you get it half done and can't figure out a workable bridge, or that last verse, etc. It can be too much!
Bring on technology!
Now some of this requires enough source material for the AI program to actually produce more songs in the idiom you're looking for, without reproducing the same song many times over because it's got only 2 or 3 source songs to work with. Probably not worth the cost of the program, assuming it doesn't cost a fortune to begin with, which assumes you have a fortune to dispense.
If you think this is hooey, well, good for you. All crafts need those hard-nosed types, face to the grindstone, spending untold amounts of time eking out a song now and then, and for what? But for all the rest of us, pressured by the flacks of modern social media, who demand that "content" be pumped out week after week, month after month, year after... well, you get the drift. It's all too much. It's quantification over quality, assuming that matters at all anymore.
So I say, if computerization got us into this mess, it can help us deal with it.
©2021 David William Pearce
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