It all started with these six notes that hooked my ear :

It sounded like an earworm to me. I was singing this melody all the time. The machine had analyzed a dataset of 429 scores of Jazz standards, so there was a lot of ‘music material’ to generate original melodies, millions of possibilities, even imposing constraints like notes length. Over the clicks (each click is a new proposal that must be kept or not), the song appeared at the center of these few notes of music. The loop of 8 measures worked very well.

A good beginning but still a lot of work to do. I was misled into dead ends for a few days. Among these impasses, is a western cartoon version where I imagined Mr Shadow on an elastic horse in a weird desert.

A Nintendo version:

…and even a very improbable version in the style of Ruychi Sakamoto:

I searched for a Capella vocal track on the net. I found a cowboy who was singing a western song. I cut out the vocal performance syllable by syllable that I stretched and pitched to force it to sing my melody. After a few hours, I had my new voice, verse, pre-chorus.

To compose the chorus, I began by lengthening a syllable of this voice, at most like a marshmallow. The vibrato waved in slow motion. I played a soft pad synth sound of notes in fourths. The path to go back to the verse was simple, with a bluesy chord (Db9).

To create the musical background of my shadow opera, I entered the machine with a piece of ambient music. This ambient music forced me to slow down the tempo from 120 to 80 PBM. The atmosphere was very beautiful, a muted snare roll gave me the groove of the piece.

It was a revelation for me. I took contact with a part of my creativity that was hidden from myself, like a shadow. I would never have written such a piece without an AI. I had created my shadow, which turns out to be a space cowboy.

This song was very useful to convince the other musicians.