I relearned a lesson yesterday. One I learned a long time ago but had forgotten in the almost two decades I have been retired. The lesson is organization… Specifically computer file organization. It’s not something I’ve ever had a real problem with. I even keep my email organized into folders. But I let the habit get rusty.
But my experiments in AI have taught me a quick lesson. Be organized from the start or you will pay the price down the road. Because if there is one thing you do experimenting with AI is you produce a lot of files in a short amount of time… music files, video files, graphic files, research files… hundreds and hundreds of files really quickly. And without a good folder setup they tend to just build up into huge directories. And I hate to have my primary hard drive filled up like that. So it’s necessary to pause on a regular basis and do file maintenence.
So… That’s what I did on Sunday. For hours on end. Going through my folders of images and videos and moving them into a more structured setup of files. As I create more music videos I saw a need for each one to have it’s own folder to hold all of the many resources that went into the creation… mp3’s, mp4’s, jpg’s, pnc’s, pdf’s… it seems like an ever growing list of files.
I plan to stay on top of the job going forward… ’cause I really don’t want to spend too many more days like yesterday.
I am still playing with song creation. I can’t really call it songwriting… My method is to throw together a stream of conscience essay and then have Gemini turn my idea into song lyrics. If the lyrics look like they make some kind of sense and carry my original feel I’ll throw them through a rewrite in a chat that uses a songwriting analysis based on the work of some major songwriters. I have a half dozen or so I try until the results resonate. Then I toss it all into Suno and listen to the results. Most times I trash everything I produce… But occasionally I really like the results.
And by doing the experiments, I sometimes see everything take unexpected turns. Like when I put my dad’s old song The New Last Letter in, it came out sounding almost like the demo he had cut back before I was born. The video is over on Youtube – The New Last Letter . After I produced that one I ran his lyrics through the songwriting analysis and the AI suggested a rewrite for the song. The overall story was the same – generally. But they tweaked to words. What came out after a little back and forth was this song…
The Ghost of the Screen Door
Two totally different sounds. Two different takes on the same basic story. Then I ran those words through another songwriters style analytics and got another take which I turned into this…
I am not sure which one I like better. I’ll probably work on putting together a video for The Ghost of the Screen Door in the next week or so. Mainly ’cause I just like the creative challenge of putting images and music together in some kind of creative whole.
