06/12/2024
pay-what-you-want download of the new Robert Schneider available now on the Cloud Recordings Bandcamp page (link in comments)
arriving 2-years after his solo album of Non-Pythagorean compositions, Songs for Other Worlds, this was surprising to me in that it turned my mind around on AI in music. aesthetically, AI-generated music didn't sit right with me, BUT these pieces are so well done, that it changed my mind on the matter!
NEW MUSIC FROM MATHEMATICS: Generative musique concrete. Dedicated to W. Cullen Hart, my dear friend, collaborator and Elephant 6 Recording Co. co-founder, for whom I was creating these sound collages from AI-generated field recordings and audio passages at the time of his passing (November, 2024). Composed by Robert Schneider and Suno AI (version 3.5), using audio source materials generated entirely by the AI that were requested, curated and edited by the human. Cover art collage by Robert Schneider, derived from the cover of the book Man and the Computer by John G. Kemeny (Scribner, 1972); Kemeny co-invented the BASIC programming language in 1964. Thank you to the Suno AI developers, to Craig Morris for technical assistance, to John Kiran Fernandes and Cloud Recordings for releasing this work, and to Chris McKay and the WOW Signal Collective for teaching me to channel AI music. Thank you to composer Michael G. Maxwell for our ongoing collaborations and work through the Mathematics and Music Lab (MML) at Michigan Technological University, and to my Michigan Tech colleagues Timothy Havens and Evan Lucas for our AI coding and development research, as well as philosopher Zachary Peck for AI research we engaged in at University of Georgia, all of which gave me inspiration for these compositions. Furthermore, I am deeply thankful to my Elephant 6 co-founders and lifelong sound collage artists, W. Cullen Hart, Jeff Mangum and Jim McIntyre, for turning me on to musique concrete; and to my son, musician-mathematician-computer scientist Max Schneider, for teaching me about artificial intelligence.
