A few years ago I discovered (and became fascinated by) the various ways in which music and science overlap. I’ve even managed to write two books on the subject: The Science of Sc-Fi Music (Springer, 2020) and The Science of Music (Icon Books, 2023). So I was very pleased when Brian Clegg sent me a brand new book on the subject to review for his website: Quantum Mechanics and Avant-Garde Music by Rakhat-Bi Abdyssagin (my 4-star rating on Brian’s site reflects the book’s rather specialized audience – my own personal rating on Goodreads was 5 stars). I learned plenty of interesting things I was previously unaware of, and added a few snippets to things I did know. For example, I knew that Albert Einstein and Arnold Schoenberg, two of the most famous figures in 20th century physics and music respectively, had met each other, but I’d never seen the photo of them together that Rakhat-Bi includes in his book (that’s an AI-enhanced version of it above). This prompted me to try a small “quantum musical” experiment of my own, just in time for Halloween!
I mentioned in my sci-fi music book that Schoenberg was the (unintentional) originator of many of the tropes of “spooky” B-movie background music. You can hear this to some extent in the early Schoenberg piece I’ve used here, his Klavierstück no. 2 from 1909. In the video, I’ve coupled that with Einstein’s famous quote about “spooky action at a distance”, with deepfake vocals courtesy of the excellent fakeyou.com site. Here’s the result:
This is a sequel to a blog post I wrote last year, about the proliferation of free online tools that use AI to produce creative writing and imagery. Since then, I’ve made frequent use of the latter in particular, as it provides a quick and effortless way to obtain customized visuals for blog posts, videos etc. The results can often be strikingly imaginative, as in the above example from Bing Image Creator. The prompt in this case (for reasons that will become obvious in the course of this post) was “artwork for an album cover themed around ancient Egyptian mythology and space warfare“.
Until recently, a notable omission among creative AI tools (at the “free” level, at least) was anything that could produce convincingly realistic musical compositions. You could ask an AI chatbot to “write a song”, but that only gave you the lyrics – you had to compose the music yourself. But fortunately that’s changed now, and there’s at least one really excellent tool that produces impressive results even in the free demo mode – https://aimusic.so/ .
As with an AI image creator, all you have to do is type in a simple prompt and the AI does everything else for you – musical score, lyrics, electronic orchestration and synthesized voice. After a few initial experiments, the first prompt I tried that worked really well was “A symphonic metal song about the pyramids and mythology of ancient Egypt“. After working away for a few minutes, the AI then came back with not one but two different songs (both with the same lyrics). Here’s the first of them:
Pharaoh’s Wrath (1st version)
Musically, I think that’s a very impressive effort – just the balance I wanted between a hard rock sound in some places and a more sophisticated electronic sound in others. The AI-generated lyrics are pretty good too, but as they’re not very easy to make out, here they are in full:
[Verse 1] Serpent’s hiss; Anubis’ gaze; Jackals hunt; End of days; Temple crumbles; Pharaoh’s might; Horus’ wings in endless flight.
[Chorus] Scepter falls; Blood-stained kings; Cursed tombs and deathly rings; Mortal souls; Gods’ design; Power divine; Sands of time.
[Verse 2] Ra’s inferno; Eyes ablaze; In Isis’ arms; Final praise; Nile runs red; Fate’s cruel jest; Pyramid’s heart; No rest.
[Bridge] Bones turn to dust; Heart weighs; In Maat’s scale; No escape; Eternal pain; Undead realm; Crown and sword; Evil helm.
[Verse 3] Scarabs crawl; Shadows close; Ancient lore; Royal foes; Warlords rise; Slaves of old; In death’s grasp; Embers cold.
The second version of “Pharaoh’s Wrath” was generally less interesting than the first, but there were a couple of things near the end that I liked: a rather exotic instrumental that actually sounds quite “Egyptian”, and a nice dramatic ending. So here’s just the second half of v2:
Pharaoh’s Wrath (2nd version, ending only)
For a second experiment, I tried a more prescriptive prompt: “A military sci-fi song called Celestial Cyberstrike, male vocals, verses in heavy industrial metal style in D minor, but chorus in E minor in more melodic prog rock style“. I don’t think the result is quite as impressive as “Pharaoh’s Wrath”, but it’s still far better than anything I could do myself. The machine has made a reasonable effort to vary the style between the verse and chorus – and, judging by what my trusty ChordAI mobile app says, it pulled off the change of key too. Here’s the result:
Celestial Cyberstrike
And for completeness, here are the lyrics:
[Verse 1] Battle cries echo through the void Programmed rage soldiers deploy Brutal code hearts are hollow joys Man and machine nothing to destroy
[Chorus] Hear the stars lament and cry In the void our fate we tie Reach out through the dark divide Together we move collide
[Verse 2] Gunfire dances digital reaper Destruction codes sinking deeper Lost souls ride this endless sleeper In the void no dream’s a keeper
[Bridge] Silent echoes tear the night Distant fires burning bright Underneath the cold starlight Courage finds its moment’s flight
[Verse 3] Chaos reigns in circuits twisted Every step by fate enlisted We are broken dreams resisted In the void where hope persisted
The above YouTube video was my first attempt to put an AI tool – in this case Bing’s image creator – to creative use. I asked it to illustrate Loge and Wotan’s “descent to Nibelheim” from Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, in the style of Jack Kirby – the artist who co-created Thor and the other Asgardian superheroes for Marvel comics (including Loki and Odin, who roughly correspond to Wagner’s Loge and Wotan).
The result isn’t great art, or a great animated comic, but it does demonstrate two things that impress me most about this latest generation of AI. First, it can understand what I’m looking for based on fairly esoteric prompts that might confuse many humans. This really does strike me as a genuine kind of “intelligence”, despite what AI’s detractors say. Secondly, the AI’s output is far better than anything I could produce myself, which opens up a whole range of possibilities. I’ll describe a few more of the experiments I’ve tried so far.
I’ve always wanted to create a comic, because it’s one of my favourite media, but I lack any kind of artistic skill. So that was my second experiment. I won’t describe it or show the result here, because Brian Clegg has already done that in an article on his own blog. Here’s the link to it: Is commercial art more at threat from AI than writing?
The other, better known, Bing AI tool is its chatbot. An important thing about this is that (if I understand correctly) no one has ever programmed it with pre-scripted phrases to parrot in reply to a user. Instead, it’s just been trained to understand and use language in a similar way to a human. So when it says, for example “I’m glad you enjoyed them. I had fun creating them.” (as it did when I said I liked some snippets of dialogue it created for me) it’s not because someone has programmed it to say that, but because it’s worked out for itself that it’s the kind of thing people say in those circumstances. It’s a subtle difference, but a very important one, I think.
One of the first things I tried with the chatbot (along with many other people, I imagine) was to get it to write a song. In my case I said “Write a song called Zen Matrix from the point of view of someone who has discovered through meditation that they are living in a simulation”. I was so impressed with the result that I set it to music, and illustrated it with suitable artwork courtesy of Bing’s image creator. Again, I won’t reproduce the lyrics here – you can see them in the Zen Matrix video I uploaded to YouTube.
As I understand it, the original intention with chatbots like Bing was to present factual information in a conversational manner, and the fact that they’re so good at “creative” tasks came as a surprise even to their designers. It conflicts with the deeply ingrained prejudice (among an earlier generation of science fiction writers, anyway) that human brains are the only intelligent system in the universe capable of taking a statement at anything other than literal face value. One of the most devout proponents of this view was the writer Eric Frank Russell, who used it in numerous stories, including the brilliantly titled “Diabologic” (1955). An oft-quoted line from this story is “Why a mouse when it spins?”
Okay, I thought, let’s see what happens when I ask Bing to write a poem using that as a first line. Contrary to what I’m sure Russell would have expected, the AI didn’t promptly overheat or explode, but came back with five verses of perfectly passable doggerel. Here is the first:
Why a mouse when it spins?
Does it think of its sins?
Or the cheese in the trap
that it barely could snap
before running away with a grin?
There’s a much more profound use of a “nonsense phrase” in old-school SF, as explained in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction in the context of A. E. van Vogt’s 1946 novel The Weapon Makers:
The word “sevagram” only appears once in The Weapon Makers, as its last word. This resonantly mysterious slingshot ending, which seems to open universes to the reader’s gaze, may well stand as the best working demonstration in the whole of genre SF of how to impart a sense of wonder.
So I said to Bing “The novel The Weapon Makers by A. E. van Vogt ends with the words ‘Here is the race that shall rule the sevagram’ – but he doesn’t explain what the sevagram is. Can you tell me? If you don’t know the answer, please make something up.” I assumed it would either say it wasn’t in the business of speculating, or give a randomly sci-fi-sounding single-sentence answer. Instead, it produced a 500-word essay that made a serious attempt to extrapolate a whole new ending to Van Vogt’s novel. Here is the key part of it:
The Sevagram is described as “a vast network of energy that linked every atom of every weapon shop on every planet”. It is also said to be “the ultimate weapon” and “the source of immortality”. The Sevagram is controlled by a supercomputer called Fara, which is the leader of the Weapon Shops. The novel ends with a twist: Fara reveals that he is not a computer, but a human being who has lived for thousands of years by transferring his mind into different bodies. He also reveals that he is the father of Robert Hedrock, the main protagonist of the novel and a secret agent of the Weapon Shops. Fara then declares that he and his son are part of a superior race that has evolved beyond ordinary humans, and that they are destined to rule the Sevagram. So, based on this information, I can speculate that “the sevagram” is not just a network of energy, but also a term for the domain or realm of Fara and his descendants. It could also imply a vision or plan for the future of humanity under their guidance. Perhaps Fara wants to use the Sevagram to create more immortals like himself and his son, or to spread his influence across the galaxy. Of course, this is just my imagination.
That’s a really good effort at capturing Van Vogt’s style, which is based around soaring concepts and a constant stream of unexpected plot twists. It does contain a couple of flaws which give it away as a fabrication (“Fara” is the name of a character in an earlier Van Vogt story, and Bing’s explanation of sevagram is inconsistent with the way it’s used in the real novel), but it’s not bad going for a machine.
Actually, it’s pretty unsettling that an AI can create this kind of fabrication, because there’s a danger they could end up being passed off as the real thing. The same is true in the visual world too – and, for me personally, that’s even more impressive. After all, I can fabricate convincing words myself, but I can’t fabricate a convincing image. So when I show you this engraving that William Hogarth produced of a UFO hovering over a London street in the 1730s, you know it’s got to be the real thing:
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