Clay and Big Orange, an experiment in AI slop vinyl record creation
I recently cancelled Apple Music (our family’s remaining streaming service subscription!) and bought a record player. This felt like a (very) small way to claw back a bit of agency from a world creeping towards AI-everything. Ironically and perhaps counter-productively, the same week I used one of the many music generation tools available to make a song as a silly / throw away tribute to a very nice guy on our block, Clay, who clears the sidewalks and roads with his snowblower which he calls Big Orange. This song was the sort of silly thing you send to your neighbors for a quick laugh then don’t think too much about again…
…except I also happen to read about a local guy who would cut one-off vinyl records for a reasonable price, and the thought of turning this AI slop song into a full record jumped into my head.
So here we are.
The music itself is what you get when you take lyrics (workshopped with ChatGPT) and ask the model(s) to generate a collection of songs in different genres / musical styles. I don’t want to get too deep into my complicated feelings of AI here (it’s complicated), but I will say that I thought quite a few of the songs generated were catchy.
As a small sample, here is first / original song, and here is the French version that my buddy (who is French] said sounded pretty good in terms of lyrics and accent.
The record itself is cut one at a time by a guy in Grand Rapids who does this out of their house. I am very much not an audiophile but I think the record sounds quite good, but the volume is noticeably lower than a “normal” pressed record. It’s a 10 inch record recorded at 33 1/3 RPM (aka an LP).
As you can see in the video, I had the vinyl cut, made labels for the record, and also had a vinyl jacket / sleeve made. The image of the orange was generated by a model (“watercolor orange on a blue background”), but I still spend a shocking amount of time actually creating the artwork (typography and layout, etc).
A real artist or vinyl connoisseur would likely quickly realize the record and artwork for what it (mainly) is, AI slop, but I still feel proud of the final artifact and was very happy to check off this project as “done” before it turned into a yearlong project involving learning to play the guitar and building a recording studio and lath for cutting my own records.
In total I made two of these records, one which I gave to Clay, and one for myself.
For anybody curious about the cost of doing this, it cost me (for each record):
- 10 inch, two sided custom record: USD$30
- Labels (side A / b): USD$8
- Sleeve: USD$12
- Shipping for the various components: USD$10
In total, roughly $60 bucks each. A lot of money for a throw away gimmick I suppose, but my hope is my neighbors got little bit of joy out of the project.