Dickens!

I have an album where the lyrics were hallucinated. Each song is named after what I thought I could hear in the singing. It was an early experiment. Other than the choice of song style prompts (and some post-processing that varied in intensity), the base is not my original work: Suno created the musical material. I didn’t even contribute uploaded melodic passages, as that wasn’t an option then. 

Nonetheless, it was a fun project, and I still like the music.

Shortly before the new year (2025), I came across a different type of language for coding metatags that I wanted to try as it is much more detailed and descriptive; however, I didn’t want my experiments to be influenced by the patterns of specific lyrics, so hallucination was once again a great context.

As I went along, I found that Suno’s willingness to hallucinate freely had been significantly dampened (which most people will want), so I decided to throw in a few words here and there to observe the effects that might be heard in different metatagged sections. Those lyrics were simply “Dickens!” and very short quotes from here and there in his works. Why? Well, It was the season for watching The Muppet Christmas Carol, but also my brother and I find it amusing to use “Dickens!” as a type of euphemism called a ‘minced oath’.

And then, as I was choosing the quotes (such as Carton’s “It is a far, far better thing I do now…”), I started wondering what it would be like if various of his characters were using his name as a curse due to all of the many agonies to which he subjects them.

That led me to the notion of Dickens being tried by those very characters as he attempts to get into Heaven, but after testifying against him (and using many other Victorian oaths), they cast him into Hell… which he ends up enjoying because he has escaped the stultifying rules of the dominant paradigm, and can write as freely as he wishes.

I used Kits AI to differentiate the voices of the characters singing their sections of the song, after first running tons of generations to get varieties on the voices, such as shifts in gender, gravel, rasp, and so on. I wanted them to sound relatively amateurish (even occasionally off key), as if the singers were spirits and not the cast of a theatrical production; furthermore, I wanted Oliver to sound young, Scrooge to sound kind of raspy and older, Nell to sound consumptive, Carton to sound melodramatic, and David to be just some guy. Dickens I wanted to portray in just a kind-of-spoken voice, both weary and mischievous. Finally, I wanted the narrator to be some sort of larger voice, like that of a judgmental angel. I think that all came out well, at least to my ears.

I used the same AI engine for this cover as I did for “Right Down to the Bone.” I might well change it later when my focus shifts away from music and back to my graphic arts projects.