Do You Wish to Continue?
Synthographic AI-generated song, invocations of the sea, and hypermarket eternity
Premiered Aug 6, 2023
Synthographic AI-generated song, invocations of the sea, and hypermarket eternity...
“Do You Wish to Continue?" is track 19 off my latest album Space Junk (2023). The video was produced in collaboration with The Department of Entertainment via Midjourney in beta. Midjourney claims to expand new modes of thought and visual expression through generative AI.
Music composed, performed and produced by Sam Lou Talbot (feat. sounds from freesound.org (CC0 License)). Video edited and produced by The Department of Entertainment.
Methodological notes.
This track is inspired by my experience of walking through the self-checkout tills at my local supermarket. The robotic voice which greets the shopper with “Do you wish to continue?” tends to strike me in existential terms, and the next minute I was recording it on my phone, knowing that it would come in useful, but not how.
I later took this voice memo and imported into Logic to begin composing the track. My initial real-time vocalisations were repetitions of the question, designed to soften it, or act like an echo, with the question reverberating through the track, as it progressed.
I then experimented with delay to wrap my voice around the robot’s, and incorporating sounds I had been compiling via freesound.org. I was particularly drawn to the nomadic properties of these sounds, and the video evokes a sense of being transported elsewhere, beyond the supermarket. However, this is an illusion as the video progresses and the loop, generated by prompts, brings us back to what seems to be a generic hypermarket. The foghorns recorded off the East Coast of the U.S. infused the track with the sense of distance and proximity I was aiming for, which I echoed in real time composition, as might an artist such as Pamela Z, or Laurie Anderson, to get the desired effect. Feedback from listeners suggests told the resulting composition is “close, yet restless”, and that it “captures a sense of modern-day alienation”.
It was only later in collaboration with The Department of Entertainment that we decided to lend it an AI synthographic. At the time, I was considering expanding Space Junk into a three-hour ASMR type release on YouTube. However, after experimenting with several videos, this was the only one I felt accomplished what I was after. The loop lends it an existential overtone which suits the themes of Space Junk.
This video sits in opposition to being experienced on a tiny screen as we tend to consume videos. It really calls to be viewed on a large screen or projector, in a darkened space, and preferably exhibited, with the sound up for an immersive experience. This has not been possible in this timeframe though. One of the complications of publishing music online is that, as makers, we have no control over how it is experienced, or whether all that attention to that final mix, and mastering is nevertheless, and inevitably, consumed on tinny headphones as MP3s on a crowded street, or bus, and then flicked off.
I experienced this last night when playing my track Dream Catcher to a group of fellow makers in a friend’s kitchen. The experience of having five people sat around a table with me listening intently and absorbing it like that was quite special. I talk about how I made this track and the intent behind it in my previous article “That Night in Hawaii When I turned into a Panther…”
Although the speakers were fine, I had always envisaged it being played, and experienced, via thumping bass speakers reverberating through the body, in keeping with the feel of analogue processing and tape-saturation in parts, which was commented upon, despite it being composed digitally.
J. asked a question on the drone which runs through the track. That drone has always been more about emerging on the other side, at least, for me. I had the same experience when making Object Voice which I bounced the final version of whilst sat looking out over the rooftop terrace of the James McCune building, in a rainstorm, and it felt transcendent.
Back to the main track, though, I had to make an executive decision over which words needed to be cut from the edit, and there were some ethical considerations discussed via my guerilla recording in “corporate air”.
I decided to cut the name of the store out of the track, but this was more an aesthetic proposition as the brand name was too much of an imposition, lending the track “too much reality”.The revised mix was more subtle, and ambiguous, with no real geographical references, other than being spoken in English. This better mirrored the generic hypermarket visualised in the synthographic, which seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. I urge you to stick with the panning to the end.
*I will be screening this video on Wednesday 15th May at the University of Glasgow, as part of a research symposium, followed by a Q&A.
Some notes on Space Junk.
Space Junk is defunct, ever-proliferating man-made debris hurtling principally in Earth orbit. It is also the title of my third album: the 34 track, five-piece, three-hour cosmic magnum opus of spontaneous songs, sounds, and spoken word. The more abstract and atmospheric songs on the album encapsulate a more disembodied sense of floating in space. The album traverses the debris and ephemera of contemporary life.