This album took shape over the last four years. It started as a way to cope with the pandemic, giving me a sense of control when everything felt chaotic.
It’s a collection of songs and imagery that I made in my spare time, as a hobby. While a big part of it is just me having fun, it also embodies significant personal growth and learning, making its release a significant milestone in my world.
If you’re inspired to create something like this of your own, you absolutely can! There are free resources and great people out there, online and in real life. I couldn’t have done this without them. Believe in yourself, put in the time, and focus on what brings you joy. Amazing things will happen.
— June 2024
Gratitude
Including others in my creative process has been vital, and I’m so thankful to these people.
Jaron Lopez helps me develop my musical skills, and Derrick Schultz helps me develop my generative art skills. Each are fantastic creatives who share their knowledge with the world — at no cost — and each offers extra opportunities that are worth paying for.
I love teaching at a school that values the arts. As a computer geek by trade, I appreciate that my colleagues in art and music are supportive and never laugh me out of the room. Special thanks to Stacy and Rob, whose constant positivity and encouragement mean so much to a guy with perpetual imposter syndrome. Thanks also go to my amazing students in Tech Projects and ACT Club — their passion, creativity, and insatiable curiosity inspires me every day.
Of course friends and family are a big part of my success, too. I suspect that many of them don’t much like weird downtempo electronic music, but they do like me, and are always open to listening, giving feedback, and hearing me blather on about compression ratios. Words can’t express how grateful I am to have you all in my life.
Audio Production
This music was mostly created within Ableton Live, with some work in Reason, both standalone and as a plugin. In addition to stock instruments and effects, I am a huge fan of products from Arturia, Baby Audio, Cherry Audio, and Sonic Charge. You’ll hear plenty of their stuff in my tracks. Most of my samples come from Splice.
My creation process varies, so you’ll find some tracks that resulted from trying to apply a concept or technique I learned, some tracks that centered around an idea or feeling, and some tracks that came from experimenting and improvisation. If I were to identify a through-line that connects all of these songs, it would be the difficult work of figuring out when to let it go and call them finished.
My ideas rarely come out exactly as I envision, and there’s always something I’d like to tweak. Coupled with a dose of self-doubt, it’s sometimes a miracle I release anything at all. Embracing imperfection is important, particularly because I am not a professional musician (and even they aren’t always perfect). But I want to create the best work that I can within the constraints of my talent and experience. I have to feel that it’s worth someone’s time to listen to my stuff. The balance between feeling like it’s good enough or not enough is a constant struggle. I’ll let you be the judge.
Video Production
I created the video with Resolume Avenue by syncing it with Ableton and doing post-production in Final Cut Pro. I added some of my own graphics made in Motion, along with licensed visuals created by Micah Buzan, Ducky3d, and Uon Visuals. Generative clips were created with a variety of resources, most open source, including Deforum, Pixray, Aphantasia, and the tools at eden.art.
This was my first foray into a full, half-hour music video, so the majority of my time was spent on learning the tools and developing a workflow. As a result, most of the licensed visuals are unmodified “stock” loops that have inspired me to want to create my own, but they are just so darned good I don’t know that I’d ever be able to get to that level of quality. Micah Buzan’s work really resonates with me, and provides much of the distinctive visual style you’ll see — his surreal, trippy animations and backgrounds fit my aesthetic perfectly.
When generating visuals with machine learning, I always think about ethics and outcomes. I am a total AI geek who has been fascinated by these tools for years — I was discussing them with my students as far back as DeepDream in 2015. It felt like this stuff went from being fascinating-but-esoteric to “it’s going to take over the world” overnight, with everyone talking about it, and that’s when I got worried. Research and exploration became less important than hype and profits for many in the field, and the internet became sludged with low-effort, low-quality content. The way the corporate hype machine describes this technology, it’s no wonder that so many creatives are angry and worried for their jobs. The reality — that this stuff is nowhere near ready to replace humans for anything worthwhile (it’s not intelligent at all, by the way, and by definition can only be derivative) — seems difficult to convey.
My Guidelines for the Use of Generative Art
- I will not generate imagery that attempts to copy specific artists or people.
- I will not sell generated imagery.
- I will not claim ownership of generated imagery.
- I will celebrate and support human artists, and pay them for their work.
- I will be transparent about my use of generated imagery.
- I will use generated imagery to enhance my creativity, not replace it.
My thinking around this topic continues to develop as the technology evolves, and so these guidelines are subject to change.
Tracks
Impulses
This track was developed using Dennis DeSantis’ Catalog of Attributes strategy, from his fantastic (and free) book Making Music. I took a piece of music that I admired and studied it in detail, writing down its attributes across all kinds of factors. I then discarded the original, and composed using my notes as a guide. The end result sounds nothing like what inspired it but still retains many of the elements that I found compelling, and it’s the first song that truly felt complete when I finished it. The star of the song, for me, is the lead synth patch, designed by Konstantin Klem. It has a melancholy, haunting feel, floating above the surface, and it instantly reminded me of Vangelis’ Blade Runner soundtrack. The spoken word sample is from “How The Ear Functions” at the Prelinger Archive, and doesn’t connect with anything other than being what felt right to include at that point in the track.
The video heavily features city aesthetics, reminiscent of Blade Runner, with renders from Ducky3d’s Blender loops, Uon Visual’s City pack, and both text-to-video and image-to-video clips generated at eden.art. One image-to-video source was generated by Open AI’s DALL-E 3. My favorite clip has to be during the second breakdown, after the spoken word section, where a glowing instrument panel shifts and morphs. I also love the progression of Uon’s city, from simple and monochromatic to wild and colorful.
Obscured
I wish every track could come together like this one! It went from nothing to nearly complete in about five hours over two weeks, with another three hours for polishing, mixing, and mastering. The core samples are from Splice, where I love using their Stacks feature to mix sounds. After selecting the base samples, I experimented with creative effects, slicing up the hi hats and other elements to create a new groove. The bass sample had some unintelligible vocal bleed, which inspired the title.
All but one of the video elements were created with generative machine learning (the horse is by Micah Buzan). This process taught me an important lesson. While learning to generate outputs in eden.art, I used photography terminology to get a specific look, asking for a ‘crane shot’ of a forest canopy descending to the ground. Instead, I got images of actual cranes—both animal and structural—and otherworldly weirdness. Initially frustrated, I soon realized the generated visuals were fantastic in their own right.
So I decided to go with it, and work with the model output instead of trying to bend it to my will. A big part of what makes this technology so interesting to me is this new form of collaboration: I give it input, it creates weird and wonderful things, and then it’s up to me to figure out what I can do with it. Embracing the weirdness and going with the flow takes me to places I’d never otherwise be able to go.
Another trick I discovered in making this video was that if I used multiple prompts that were similar, but shortened the time it had to transition between prompts (usually, you’ll want lots of frames to smoothly transition, like Veiled Embers), the abrupt changes can be synchronized to the beat. The result was delightful.
Colors and Clouds
This is the most experimental track on the album, with elements created generatively rather than composed. Inspired by a Venus Theory tutorial, I added elements and selected specific parts of the generative output that fit together. The result is… different. It ventures into chaotic spaces but is grounded by the beat, bass, and a pedal tone toward the end.
For the video, I loved the cloud textures generated by eden.art and featured two of my favorite generative methods: Pixray Panorama for the song’s start and a long Aphantasia clip.
Towers of Midnight
This is a there-and-back-again song that starts and ends in the same place, taking a freaky journey in between. It’s entirely sample-based, with modifications and slicing, and is another example of a track that came together quickly (though not as fast as ‘Obscured’). The video exclusively features the incredible work of Micah Buzan, showcasing his exceptional creativity and artistry.
Junker
I almost didn’t include this track because it’s the last one I produced exclusively in Reason, way before the others, and it feels like it’s from another era. However, I liked it too much to leave out. Playing with the visuals was particularly fun, aiming to reference Kraftwerk enough to honor one of my biggest influences without being too derivative.
Veiled Embers
If you’d like a good example of my nerdiness, this is it. Creating a track contemplating death and impermanence is not going to get me on many playlists! It’s taken me a while to let myself follow ideas wherever they lead. Even if they end up weird or esoteric, it’s 100% me. The spoken word excerpt is from a poem that deeply impacted me in my youth, Thanatopsis by William Cullen Bryant, read by Kevin S.
The visuals are more fluid, with a Mozarabic-inspired Deforum zoom that fits the track perfectly.
Hey, Grey
When the pandemic hit, I was very lucky. I have a great home and someone to share it with, I’m in reasonably good health, and I could work remotely for the first year. Still, it terrified me. We didn’t know how things would turn out; there was so much death and despair, and many systems meant to protect us proved ineffective. My life’s rhythms were disrupted, and I felt more isolated than ever. The killing of George Floyd added to the outrage and uncertainty about our world. I found myself in a very dark place, unsure of how to emerge or if I even should.
Eventually, I realized I’d felt this way before—only the circumstances were different. As a kid, I’d experienced tough times, feeling powerless and angry at the world. It was like reacquainting with an old foe. Reflecting on it, I recognized that cruelty, inequality, and fate’s capriciousness are as much a part of life as anything else, but I was not completely powerless.
I could separate sense from nonsense, and make informed decisions. I could determine what was under my control, and do my best to let the rest go. I could also create something to remind myself of the beauty and resilience we have within ourselves, and that’s this song. When everything felt like it was spiraling toward oblivion, creating something new and positive was my anchor. It’s imperfect and just a drop in the bucket, but it’s something, and it made a difference.
The visuals blend generative clips, Blender renders by Ducky3d, and Micah Buzan animations. Some of the generative clips were prompted to show static like an old analog television, but of course I didn’t get that. One of them formed the visage of a young woman who turns her head and looks at us before fading into the mist. Where did she come from? Like a ghost, she is there, and then gone.