First Live Performance of Our AI Written Songs

[BONES]

Last night we played our first gig that included some of the new material we've been working on, based on songs generated by us in Tunee. On stage I was really emphatic about them being new songs, so I could ask a few trusted acquaintances about them later. All initial reports were that they were really good (what else are they going to say to your face) and when I told them they were written by AI, they all said that it didn't sound like AI, it sounded like NOVAkILL which, of course, is exactly what we'd hoped for.

Interestingly, the AI songs seemed to get deeper engagement with the audience than our other material, particularly the one I thought was the weaker of the three we played. They picked up on its lyrical theme and after the show 3 or 4 people threw it back at us, which is not something we've experienced in the past. To be fair, audience engagement across the whole night was incredible, one of those magical gigs you get to experience every now and then, but the AI songs were definitely a hit with the crowd.

For us it is total vindication of the work we've been doing with Tunee over the past 3 months. Now that the gig is out of the way, we're going to start recording vocals so I should have some WiPs to share in the next few weeks.

[zerocrossing]

Why not just have a projector project some AI generated video to your AI generated music and you can just relax and let the checks roll in?

[BONES]

It occurred to me last night that video projections are a huge distraction from a performance. The video was being projected on a side wall and you had to choose whether to watch the video or the band. We don't do video projections so we weren't using it and everybody was watching us, all the time. With the other acts the audience's attention was divided. It didn't add anything, it was a waste of time.

The other thing of course, is that we weren't playing AI generated music because I've rebuilt it all in Studio Pro. Tunee wrote the songs, at our direction, but just as with the rest of the set, the music was all coming out of our VSTi, via Studio Pro, with Craig and me playing over the top of it. It requires a f**k-tonne more work than doing it any other way I can think of and still needed at least as much rehearsal.

It definitely saves us time but it's not a short-cut, it's still hard f**king work. It will be around 6 months from the time we started work to having a finished album, which is maybe 3 months faster than we did the last one. And if last night was any indication, it's going to be a better album, too.

[Michael L]

Nice to get the updates.
Performing AI-written music live is certainly an interesting twist.
It sounds like you were using Tunee like an oldschool producer, who works on every track and is infinitely tolerant.

[Seafire Mk2]

Is tunee free?

[ghettosynth]

Is tunee free?

It is at a basic level. To try it out is free, so is Suno. Both charge a similar price if you want more credits per day. Suno had about half off, or so, on Black Friday.

[BONES]

Is tunee free?

You can get 150 daily credits free with an account. Craig has three free accounts, which seems to be enough for 4-5 hours of faffing about per day.

Along with a lot of other people, he has been very unhappy with a couple of recent updates to Tunee. He hasn't been able to get it to do anything useful for 6 weeks or so. He says it seems almost completely focused on pop music now.

[BONES]

Nice to get the updates.
Performing AI-written music live is certainly an interesting twist.
It sounds like you were using Tunee like an oldschool producer, who works on every track and is infinitely tolerant.

To me it feels like working up a cover version of a favourite song. You do the best job you can and hope you're doing justice to the source material. But because nobody else has ever heard that source material, you don't feel like you need to change anything to distance your version from the original, which gives you a lot more freedom to play around with it.

[eassae]

Last night we played our first gig that included some of the new material we've been working on, based on songs generated by us in Tunee.

So you're like an AI cover band.

[BONES]

That's more in my part of the process, in that my bandmate is giving me finished songs, rather than just rough ideas. I'd say the overall process is more like a band in a studio, co-writing with their producer. The song ideas are still ours, the AI collaborates in bringing them to life.

Like a cover version, which you tend to choose very carefully, these are songs that resonate strongly with us. Realistically, they are a distillation of what we've been trying to do for 30 years. Instead of the usual process of going in with vague intentions of writing some new songs, working with AI requires you to enunciate exactly what it is you want to do up front. It's quite clarifying and when we get it right, it becomes a very pure expression of our intentions. By necessity, it's more focused, although I suppose you could be a bit vague and you might still get useful results.

The important factor, though, is that you don't accept mediocrity, you keep at it until the AI gives you what you were after. Often that won't be exactly what you might have had in your head, it's far too imprecise for that, but with a lot of patience you can get something that might be even better than what you were imagining, or even two or three useful pieces that come out of one set of prompts.

One of the problems I've got at the moment is we have two quite different songs with mostly the same lyrics and I have to decide which one gets to keep them and which one I have to write some new lyrics for. (I say "I" have to write the lyrics but Co-Pilot will be heavily involved with that process.) They were the first two songs we started working on, and after listening to them constantly for the last 4 months or so, they are deeply embedded in each song in my head. That presents a different kind of challenge, although I have taken a set of lyrics before and moved them from one song to another.

Overall, it's a very different process but it still involves a lot of hard work and it still takes a lot of time to bring it all together. Using Tunee doesn't feel like a short-cut or cheating nearly as much as getting Co-Pilot to help me with lyrics does. Although 80% or more of the lyrics I end up with are mine, AI makes lyric writing so much easier by providing inspiration. I might give it a theme or a chorus or a verse and I let it spit out another 6-8 verses or a few paragraphs of prose. I take some of those ideas and flesh them out, re-write them in a way that works for me/us. It is another form of collaboration, one that makes the process far less tedious but, again, the ideas are still mine/ours.

[BBFG#]

I watched an interview with Rick Wakenan awhile back where he said they were basically turned into a cover band by their listeners expectations of playing every solo the exact way they played it on the studio album. Even though they were improvs during it and eventually having to go back and practice it as a written part. I get that, since I've had to do the same thing in the past.
People's expectations can be more limiting than anything else.

[BONES]

Absolutely. John Watts, from Fischer-Z, in response to criticism that they didn't always play their hits said that as far as he was concerned, they only had an obligation to be good, not to do exactly what an audience expects. I think that's a healthy way to approach it.

Bands like Killing Joke have released 17 or 18 studio albums but they still play 3 or 4 songs from their first album at most gigs, which I find a bit silly. At the other extreme, last time I saw the Damned, they played all but one song from their brand new album, which had only been out for a few weeks at the time, and only a handful of their classics. I think that was going too far the other way.

We used to try and play something from each album but we've got so much material these days, and the new stuff is so much better than a lot of the old stuff, that we've decided we'll play our best songs, wherever they happen to be in our chronology. Consequently, we didn't play anything from our first four albums the other night and only one song from the 5th. Everything else was from the last couple of years. It was only a 45 minute set so we might have played some older songs if we'd had more time, although it's more likely we'd have played more new songs. We've played the old stuff plenty of times, gigs are far harder to come by these days.