SOULSIGMA

Announcing a collection of genuine Sigma music

As subscribers here know, I’ve posted a few of my musical experiments here from time to time when they’ve been at least tangentially relevant to the topics being discussed. And on the off chance that a few of you are interested in hearing more, I’ve just launched a short two-week crowdfund for my first solo project, which is called SOULSIGMA: The Only Skull.

Here is a brief sampler video so you can hear what the audio quality sounds like, although if the campaign hits the first stretch goal, I’ll have one of the music industry’s top audio engineers give it an additional tune-up.

THE ONLY SKULL consists of ten songs, all of them original compositions, although two are based upon poems by Lord Byron to which I added a chorus or additional verses, as required. They are as follows:

1. 3:35 RIDE AND DIE (Suzuki 750 mix)

2. 4:17 THE ONLY SKULL (Rhyme and Revel mix)

3. 5:03 ANGEL IN FLIGHT (Nothing in the World mix)

4. 4:16 SEASONS (Roads Not Taken mix)

5. 4:01 NEPTUNE GRIEVES (Gods Despair mix)

6. 3:28 MY SECRET SIN (Darkness Enters mix)

7. 3:31 THE SHINING WIRE (Black Rabbit mix)

8. 3:39 THE WORD DESCENDED (Verbum Caro mix)

9. 5:30 ONCE THERE WAS SORROW (Vanished Memories mix)

10. 3:53 THE RIDE NEVER ENDS

The music and vocals are all AI-generated, which should not be confused with simply throwing a prompt out there and calling it a day as with ChatGPT. It’s more like working with hundreds of musicians and telling one guitarist that you like his riff, a bassist that you like his groove, and then selecting from between the various interpretations of a lyric from the fifty vocalists you’ve got at your disposal. In other words, it still requires making all the structural decisions as a producer, only with totally insane machines providing the input instead of moody musicians.

The advantage is that you have a lot more - and by a lot, I mean several orders of magnitude more - which which to work. This is why the process is both a) much faster and b) much more maddening. Unlike with humans, you can’t yet tell the machine “do exactly what you did before, only go up on the last note instead of down.” No, most of the time you just have to restart that section from scratch. Again.

Let’s just say this is not a hobby for the impatient or the indecisive.

I’ve recorded more songs than are being released on the album. Above is a video that one of my Booster Patrol bandmates put together for a song that he particularly liked, A MERCILESS NIGHT, which was the end result of an experiment working on an original Japanese song called 悲しみの影, or Shadow of Sadness, that I translated into English. It should also help give you an idea of the overall sound and audio quality of what is being produced.

Anyhow, all that counts is the end result. At least, in my book, that’s all that counts, although perhaps it’s just another example of the traditional Sigma focus on the mission instead of the process. And whether you choose to back the project or not, I hope you’ll enjoy listening to at least one of the songs at some point in the future.

UPDATE: The campaign hit its goal on Day One! Thanks to the 11 backers who made it possible. I’m going to change the stretch goal since I’ve already arranged to have all 10 songs, plus the two bonus songs, professionally mastered.