Earlier this year, musical artist Grimes unveiled software called Elf.Tech, which allows users to submit vocals and have them reproduced by Grimes using voice synthesis. If approved, users will have an official Grimes collaboration and Grimes will get 50% of the profits.
Always interested in pushing the limits of new tech, we wanted to try it out. We submitted some Auralnuats stuff and some other original pieces, but we weren’t thrilled with the results (the Last Laser Master was particularly abysmal).
Except for one.
A little while ago, we composed and produced an anime style theme song for our friends over at 1-900-Hotdog. If you’re unfamiliar, we’ve produced a few different songs for their podcast based on various themes. They wanted something evocative of anime opening credits, so we created an epic and bubbly song about friendship and processed meats.
Fast forward to now, where the arbiters of the Grimes AI have approved our collaboration, so now we have a track about hot dog magic sung by Grimes in perfect Japanese. The future is now.
To take it a step further, we reached out to some video producers to whip up an AI generated anime style music video to go with it. And it’s…wow. Enjoy!
Okay, an artist getting paid for work is, like, the opposite of shitty, even if you’re not a fan of said artist… That’s not what enshittification is about. In fact, an artist getting fairly compensated is literally the opposite of that…
I don’t know why people are surprised that artists look for other ways to fund their work, given just how little they get off streaming. It’s a minuscule amount of money (if ANY), so I’m not gonna be too mad about stuff like this…
It’s not an artist getting paid for an app/service that they sell that annoys me - lots of artists in the electronic world sell apps, even hardware (and have done for decades - you could buy the Gristleiser from Chris Carter in various forms for decades from pedals, to plugins, to Eurorack), it’s the layering of it in AI bullshit. It’s this year’s NFT.
For me, it’s Grimes. Just as folks cannot support some artists like Anish Kapoor for their Capitalist or political views, I can’t feel any support for someone who was making excuses for Elon Musk’s goals just 3 years ago. She claims to be leftist, but I just don’t believe her. I see her more as an opportunist.
Indeed, but again, you can hardly fault artists for seeking to make some money, even if it is off the latest BS… the recording industry has always been shit, and it’s just a million times worse since the advent of streaming… So, yeah… I’m not too annoyed about this.
I never said other wise, but again, she’s not unique in that. She’ll just get called out for it much more than men do…
I don’t call out Coldcut for selling VJamm any more than I did Monolake for Ableton, nor when I was looking at Taylor travel guitars as a possible purchase today did the Taylor Swift signature edition give me any kind of pause- it’s a nice guitar and it’s kind of fun they would do one.
They’re real things. This is hype bullshit. The existence of this kind of NFT bollox is damaging, even if you don’t buy it.
Hatsune Miku vocaloid ftw. The (near enough) original and, let’s face it, for all their hypey nonsense about AI that’s all this is. Just wrapped up in lies.
Plus I can’t see the western vocaloid community rallying behind someone who defends her transphobic baby daddy (that community created the whole “Hatsune Miku created Minecraft” meme specifically to trol Notch who was on his transphobic bs on twitter and it got under his skin really bad too).
Also, the 50% cut is too much for many producers in that community. When Yamaha released the Fukase voicebank (who was based and voiced by a guy of the same name from the band Sekai no Owari) many years ago they asked for a much bigger cut with a portion of a song sales and more restrictions on character usage in promotional materials, it kinda hurt that project. At the time when vocaloid was the premiere singing synth/emulator software, it was the companies who where the most flexible with character/voice usage that tended to be the most successful and not so much if the voice came from a famous person (although Gackt did made his voicebanks before getting famous so I dunno at the end of the day).
Since you’re curious about what that pedal sounds like @robertmckenna, this is what Jack White did with it years ago
Personally I feel that there has been a bit of a decline of interest in vocaloid music. I heard a few people blame vtubers but there is some validity to that theory since a vtuber’s main job at the end of the day is to connect with their audience and with vocaloid it can be more difficult to connect to an individual’s perspective when you mix in the community’s meme-like perspective to hearing those singing voices which originally powered that community/fanbase in the first place. But in many ways it could show how AI could ultimately fail when it comes to creative work. The ability to someone to parse a creative’s intention and the ability to second guess themselves and wonder how the work would be perceived which can’t be done with math problems alone is something Hollywood execs begrudgingly finally had to accept recently with working out an deal to hopefully end the writer’s strike.
Altman already has a mysterious crypto device, so now he wants one that’s AI-flavored. Whatever the claimed purpose, it’ll be a plot device for stealing personal data.
