john

Hi I am looking for a tool to help me create music videos. Ideally something that might take photo input and then generate video output, where photos are extrapolated using AI guided by my text input. For example: I upload a photo and provide the input text: Use the uploaded photograph as a starting point. Create a music video segment of 4 bars in length for a piece of music of 132 bpm. Music is upbeat, lyrics are about loss and are contemplative in nature. Include at least 2 camera perspectives. The video should be creative and inspired visually by the works of Monet and Degas and the movie A Clockwork Orange. Assume a frame rate of 30fps and an aspect ratio of 16:9 in full HD quality. This video segment is for the first 2 lines of the chorus section, for the following lyrics: ”There’s not much now that we can do For the feelings between us and you” Any recommendations for the tools and how to use them would be greatly appreciated. Cheers John @GregB

Hi Inspired by a topic by @GregB if you’ve been using AI and it has gone spectacularly wrong, for creating images, video, music, lyrics etc…. Post up your bad results! cheers John

Absolutely, I am an entertainer, but that is not all I am. Often when this, and other topics, are invoked, people talk in absolutes. I am this. I am not that. I think the truth is more complicated than that. While some think that they are there to entertain everyone or they aren’t there to entertain anyone, I think that any song I do might entertain a segment of the audience it will not entertain all the audience. Equally a different song of mine might entertain an entirely different audience. I am not duty bound to entertain a specific audience segment, though it might be wise to focus my effort on a segment in order to build my audience. It gets interesting for artists when they get towards self-censoring because of appeal. All artists do this, only the degree varies. Amount might vary, and other reasons may be given to hide behind, but main purpose or side effect/net effect still means the content output is filtered. For example, unfiltered behind the scenes videos. Of course they are filtered. Still, musicians are there to entertain. They are also there to elicit emotional response. They amplify what songs mean, and the depth of meaning. They don’t absolutely need to agree with the message, concept or emotion conveyed by a song they perform on, but maybe if you disagree with the message of the works you perform on, you should change band or change material. As a writer performer I don’t face that dilemma. I face others pretty full on though… I depend on my music income. I definitely want my songs to resonate with someone. Overall I want them to be entertained by my body of work… apart from anything else appeal has an effect on how much I earn, and I want to eat and stay warm, just like the next guy. However, many of my songs are focused on issues that mean something to me, and I want people to connect with the issues as much as my song. I want my songs to be thought provoking. I want people to have a reaction to them. The issues might be governance or greed or mental health or social status. I realise we’ve been going through a desert when it comes to songs about social issues, but that is where songwriters and musicians etc are more than one thing to society, even if some thought police elements keep trying to get us to fit into specific boxes. I view our role much the same as the bard of times past. We entertain. We spread news. We shine a light. We provoke. We challenge. We hold a mirror up to society. We do all these things and more. It is my choice where that balance lies for me personally. That position does change. It is not my job to tell anyone else where they stand in all these roles, if asked, I would happily discuss it with anyone. All we can or should ever do is to shine a light and let others make up their own mind. Specifically on entertainment, how could we not be entertainers? If we accept that role, really, we should largely accept what goes with it, even if we don’t leave it unchallenged. So, for example, if we accept we are there to, in part, entertain, then we should care about our audience demographic. If we don’t our exposure could be entirely to the wrong demographic. That doesn’t entertain anyone, or realistically encourage people with different views to embrace our perspective. If we embrace audience demographics then we have to accept growing our listener base. We then have to be aware of where we draw lines and where there is a possibility of differences of views… and that is massively dependent on topics of songs. We match songs to audience and most of our listeners should be happy. This should be a truth for our tribe. It is not a bad word. There is no right answer. There are answers that are mostly right for most creators. Truth is, I am largely tolerant of all views other than views of forced intolerance, which is pretty ironic. So yes, entertainer, but not only an entertainer, not an entertainer at all costs. Sometimes it is our most important role, at others, our least important role. It is something each of us should choose, and keep on choosing. That means, personally, I would always recommend informed choice. Be smart, learn.

Lol wonderful. Some of the stuff AI gets wrong is amazing. For a long time hands seemed to be a particular problem. I don’t want to detract from your journey, so I plan to start a new topic I will tag you on where I am looking to create a new video by ai generated video using photo and text prompts.p to get workable results. Meanwhile while I am enjoying your voyage... Now I am also promoted to start a topic about when AI goes wrong on image generation!

Hi If you could only listen to 3 albums for the rest of your life, what would they be? Go! Cheers John

Hi soul_Quest! Welcome to the Songstuff family What plans do you have for your music?

Hey Kacper, welcome to the Songstuff music community. Great to have you with us. Cheers John

Good goals to have, though I don’t set goals about number of songs. Instead I try to commit to the process, regular writing habits and process for writing. I have plenty ideas and I happily work on several songs at the same time, writing for the song I feel most inspired about in that moment. I feel it’s healthier to have an endpoint for groups of tracks. Usually that is in the form of recordings. I feel it helps draw the line under certain styles or ways of working, to make it easier to move on stylistically.

I removed their spam link

Still young yet! A lot of retirees head for open mic nights or decide to at least record their songs even if for private consumption. I always feel a little sad when all the work writers spend perfecting their craft goes unwitnessed, and unappreciated. I do entirely understand the lack of drive to head out. What about recording live performances using a web cam for a YouTube channel? There are many options these days to leaving them on a shelf.

*now disappointed* on a bright note the spam post involved used AI to write the ad. I don’t think I delivered a verdict other than they have majorly improved. I did a lot of coding for a number of AI technology in the 90s and periodically ever since just from interest. I did a lot with neural networks and played with hybrid technologies (the combination of different learning tech, using tech where it is best suited. My favorite tech was genetic algorithms written with C++ or C#. I was pretty interested in adaptive interfaces… that is, so many programs offer so many options that the interface becomes highly crowded, and function is obscured by option overwhelm. Also, with my background in music technology, at the time, I was interested in using learning algorithms for tasks beyond recording engineers and music producers of the day, and for me that was removing noise and unwanted signal elements from audio, for example using learning algorithms to remove unwanted room artefacts. If you don’t have a spectacular sounding space, the aim was to clean an instrument recording as if they had been recorded in an Anechoic chamber, so that the entire environment of the audio space would be added by effects units… giving producers the ability to recover recordings ruined by poor environment. AI has a lot of potential… to get good results from a lot of AI still needs significant input and control from humans. This is true for audio processing and for music marketing. My experimentations with lyric writing (purely for evaluation) were disappointing and I haven’t done anything with AI composition or video. AI images took a lot of attempts to get something half decent using several programs. AI is a work in progress. Always. How we manage the use of AI is still critical to anything approaching success. Give it some time and we will largely still see tools to be used by talented people in imaginative ways. You have to remember, by far the majority of actors in this space are in product development. There looking for tools to be used by people, skilled and unskilled, because people buy. A lot of the “push button song” brigade is a harder sell. It’s going to a fad until their main customer base gets bored. Pretty soon they will get bored with it, despite evolutions that introduce more believable versions. That only holds the attention of non musicians for a while. It might be around a while but I really, really don’t see it dominating for long. I predict that one of the biggest evolution is in the realm of video and video animation… as a visual tool for music creators. The video industry stands to lose more ground than music. That said… AI is going to shake everything up.

Hey Mark Welcome to the Songstuff! What are you planning for your songs? Cheers John

Very true, but for some artists that was more a limit of their vision and their ambition. That is true for pretty well every product type. Some people are innovators, some followers. Some are in tune, some out of touch. Some work hard some lazy and some it comes to easy. I guess I'm saying for some, they just aren't very good. Sub-standard material is built into some genres. Punk is always a mix. Songs can be poor quality, with simple chords, a simple melody, and poor musicianship, and yet be entirely perfect and utterly suitable for purpose. So much is subjective. Still, we can often meet in consensus... that we know sub-standard, low-effort music when we hear it.

Hey Following on from @Jac's topic on Led Zeppelin, I thought I would create a topic on Pink Floyd. One of the biggest bands of all time, Pink Floyd has been a big influence on me, including a strong influence of ambiance and avant guard styles on my own music. I've been lucky enough to see them, at Earls Court at one of the concerts immortalized in their Pulse concert video. I would have seen them at Wembley also, a few years before, except that my motorbike broke down just before I had to leave for the gig, and Glasgow to London isn't a short journey. I still have the tickets for both gigs. Here's a link to a Comfortably Numb from The Wall album, played at Earls Court in 1994: Pure magic as this may be, my favorite overall video is still Live at Pompeii. Here's Echoes, Live at Pompeii: Cheers John

Oh wow. A long time ago for my last actual band name. I remember spending ages coming up with lists of potential names. So many were crap or plain funny. Some were interesting, quirky, or off the wall. Some I loved but didn't think they suited. One I remember my drummer, Richard, coming up with was "Simon Snodgrass and his Simply Amazing Snowshoe". Great use of alliteration, but... I'm not sure mushrooms weren't involved. Different days.

Firstly, a great post Greg. Quite a bit of work in there. I look forward to the day I can choose to generate the idea, create a draft vid, create the stages of the vid, and or hi here's the song and the conceptual parameters... go. I know I for one love the doing, but AI really is very useful when you apply it with a degree of understanding of the subject at hand and a degree of understanding of the nature of AI... the parameters you need to set, the initial queries to get good results. Good stuff though. I have been using AI for a number of reasons, for evaluation, and I have found it genuinely useful and frustratingly incorrect. You can't take its output simply as right. It gets things very wrong, it invents stuff and it lies.... which does make for a fun interaction!

Hey there Chris, great to meet you. Welcome to the Songstuff music community.

Hey Austin, welcome to the Songstuff Music Community Good to have you aboard. A great set of influences. I look forward to hearing your music!

Hi Bridget. Nice to meet you. Welcome to Songstuff! Try Ruairi Glasheen, Nicolle Fig and BodhranMasterclass, plus this Siobhan O'Donnell video.

Why thank you In the 80s synth music and particular samplers were popular and there was chat about musicians being replaced. It's true to a degree. They were. But it spawned entirely new genres. It brought about big changes, but it didn't do half as much damage as the drive for free music based on misinformation during the online music piracy peak and the rise of streaming companies like Spotify that pay artists a tiny royalty.

Thanks for your compliments. You’ll find people at all stages from lyricists looking for composers through to producers looking for specific instrumentation or guidance and collaboration on production. Making a post in our collab board might help, adding specifics to your board profile might help and of course general activity will raise awareness after that.

I shared some early, one take drafts recorded on my phone in Steve’s New Music Fridays topics. I will be posting relating to my music in several places in the community. I will post up my draft tracks in a new community subscriber critique board (more on that later), I will be starting a club I hope to use for building a skilled core street team. As I roll forward I hope to add some unskilled/semiskilled to the team too. I’ll do a lot more besides, building on the community. Thank you! I wasn’t fishing for compliments, but I am thankful either way. Mostly it’s been passing shots from people banned for good reason. Thanks again

I never for one minute thought you would, my friend. If I knew you were, believe me I would very strongly advise you against it. I would pester you to change your mind. Most of the Twitter tactics being pursued by artists… on other platforms too, but especially micro-blogging platforms (as they used to be called), are really a bad, bad idea.

The interesting thing is, he’s doing a lot of what we’ve been suggesting to artists for ages (not everything) and taken a few things really pretty far. It’s impressive. From my perspective he’s really useful as an example they can see. When I say to artists “do this” I am sure more than a few think “what you say sounds good, but does it really work?” Or some variation of that. Sure, for some of my recommendations you can see mainstream artists doing them, but some things mainstream artists do would not work for independents. At the same time, some recommendations for independents are not mainstream artist activities. I didn’t push my own music for many years, for a number of reasons. Unfortunately people often then question advice (as they should) because they think if my advice is so good, why didn’t I use it? Or worse they look at where I am with my music and think I did apply it and look where I am. Fortunately a lot of what I suggest Ren and other successful indies are doing. I can explain marketing activities, give them context, connect them together, and point to artists like Ren who are actively using them or a variation of them. Belief in what you are doing helps artists to act decisively and with confidence.

So how do you think they perceive you?