What's mine in a song made with AI

I did a slightly silly exercise the other day. I took one of my songs and asked myself what would be left if someone removed, one by one, everything I'd put into it. Whatever remained at the end would be what isn't mine. It struck me as a more honest way of answering the question I get asked so often, because that way I can't dress myself up.

Here's what came out.

First, the words go

They're the easiest thing to remove and the most noticeable. Without lyrics, the song loses its subject, its joke, its characters. I write every PLANETA GAYFOLK lyric myself. They're about gay love, exes, pride, self-esteem and the small things that happen on any old Tuesday.

Take away the lyric and what's left is music that could go with anything else. A fabric-softener advert, for example. I don't say that to look down on the music, which can be very beautiful. But without the words it doesn't know what it's talking about.

Then there's the title. It seems like part of the lyric and it isn't. For me the title is a separate decision, almost a genre of its own. «La vecina cotilla» (The nosy neighbour) puts someone we all know right in front of you, eye to the peephole. «Mitad Venezuela, mitad Pakistán» (Half Venezuela, half Pakistan) makes you imagine somebody before you've heard a thing. They're titles that already do half the work.

Take away the title and the song loses its front door. Lots of people decide whether to listen based on what it's called. I choose that, sometimes after a great deal of mulling.

Then the decisions go

From here on starts the less visible part, which is the decisions. I produce the music with Suno, an artificial intelligence tool, and what it does is offer me versions. I decide which one works. Take that away and what you're left with is a heap of possibilities in no order, all at once, none of them the song.

That part is hard to defend in front of some people, because from outside it looks like very little. Choosing. Like choosing a shirt. But anyone who's ever edited anything knows that choosing badly wrecks good work, and choosing well can rescue mediocre work. Judgement isn't visible. You can feel it.

There's another decision that hardly ever gets mentioned and is, for me, one of the most mine: what I don't release. A song can be finished, with its lyric and a version that sounds good, and still be left out. Because it's too like another one. Because I've already made that joke better somewhere else. Because one day I listen and realise I don't care, and if I don't care I can't ask anyone else to.

Take away that no and you've got a bigger, worse catalogue. The 273 singles I've released in two years are a lot, I know. But they're also a selection, even if from outside it doesn't look like one.

The order goes too. A song on its own is one thing. A song inside an album is another. The GAYFOLK trilogy, with «Descubierto un nuevo planeta llamado GAYFOLK», «Ojalá se pudiera viajar a GAYFOLK» and «El día de la liberación» (A new planet called GAYFOLK has been discovered; If only you could travel to GAYFOLK; Liberation Day), is designed as a single story in three acts. Which song goes in which act, which opens, which closes, which sits right before another so they answer each other. All of that is mine.

Take away the order and you have the same songs telling a different story, or none.

And the image goes. I direct the music videos, now over 280 of them, and hundreds of short clips. I also decide the look of every release, because I'm the artistic director of my own label, MIKE SAIN'T LOUIS. Some people get to know a song of mine first by how it looks and only then by how it sounds. That eye is mine as well.

What's left

At the end of the exercise, something concrete remained: the raw sound the machine produces. The exact melody it proposes, the timbre of the vocals, many details of the arrangement. I didn't invent that note by note, and I'm not going to claim I did.

It was a useful exercise because it forced me to look that part in the face. It's no small thing. It's the part you hear, the part that reaches your ear first. Some will say that's why the song belongs more to the machine than to me. I understand that as an argument. I don't share it, but I understand it.

What I think is that the machine wouldn't have made that song without me, and I wouldn't have made it without the machine. Without me it would have made a different one, about nothing in particular. Without the machine, I'd have a lyric in a notebook waiting for someone to set it to music. Authorship, in my case, is the sum of everything I removed in the exercise. And almost everything I removed was mine.

A doubt that won't go away

There's one unease I want to put in writing. Some days the machine surprises me with something I'd never have imagined, a melody that gives the lyric a new meaning, and I'm as pleased as if I'd done it myself. Then I think: I didn't do it. I recognised it. I let it through. I chose it.

Is that less mine? A little, yes, I think. Just as a discovery in a conversation belongs to both people talking. It seems healthy not to resolve it completely. I'd rather live with that question open than pretend everything you hear comes out of my head.

What I do know is that if the tool vanished tomorrow, the lyrics would still be there. The 273 I've released in two years. That's the most mine thing I have.

All of them, with their full lyrics, are at mikesaintlouis.com.