CORNUCOPICA. ROBERTO FLAUTO'S FIRST MUSICAL ALBUM
Cornucopica. The first music album by Roberto Flauto has been published on YouTube <1 >
🎤 Roberto Flauto, artist and all-round creative: sociologist, writer, poet, lecturer, author of film reviews and analyses, free thinker... how did the idea of exploring the world of music come about?
Music is the primordial dimension of poetry , which in the dimension of singing represents the first form of transmission and conservation of information. Poetry, in short, was born as a mnemonic. And I believe that anyone who approaches the study of the poetic device, and of communicative processes in general, cannot ignore this consideration. I'm trying to say that music accompanies my every step, even in the field of scientific research. I say this to give an idea of my daily relationship with music, which pervades every area of my life. I believe that every poet, a category in which I recognize myself with a bit of embarrassment, as such, has a privileged relationship with music. And the step from writing in verse to composing musical lyrics was short. The idea of composing a real album was born by chance, but in the space of a few weeks it turned into reality. It is a project that thrilled and entertained me, and which allowed me to give full vent to my creativity. The suggestion to create songs varying on the "fruit" theme was born for fun, chatting with a friend at the bar on a hot afternoon last July. I wrote the lyrics and set them to music with the help of an artificial intelligence program. Some songs I created in a few minutes (Banana nana, Frutti di Bosco), others took me more than a week and dozens of attempts (Ananasssss, Tamarindo). I explored many genres, from jazz to rock, from k-pop to mariachi, from electronic to rap. I had fun playing with words (there is an entirely monovocal piece), with ideas, with subjects and feelings. I think I will continue to make music in this way.
🎤 How did you experience the transition from written language, which is yours " natural battlefield" with verbal, musical language?
Look, familiarity with writing in verse, or in any case with writing tout court, in many respects has made this passage is slight. Of course, inevitably writing lyrics for a song involves attention - verbal, syntactic, stylistic - that I wasn't used to. However, it was very intriguing to deal with this writing, and I also found it satisfying. While I was writing I had the musical basis, the style, the rhythm clearly in mind, which I then recreated - sometimes with quite a bit of effort - with artificial intelligence.
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🎤 Tell us about your creative path: not being a musician, did you also use artificial intelligence to compose the music you had in mind?
< 0>I'm not a musician, I don't know how to play any instrument, and so I resorted to an artificial intelligence program capable of generating tracks based on the input received. I worked by choosing the vocal style, the genres (there are dozens and dozens), combining them to get the basis I had in mind. For each song, I created several versions, each time rounding off some corners, cleaning up some nuances, cutting or adding something, improving some points. As I was saying, some tracks took me several days of work because I couldn't get the result I had in mind. Overall, I'm still satisfied. More generally, I realize that the issue relating to the use of artificial intelligence in the artistic field, particularly in music, is extremely complex, ambiguous and contradictory. There is enormous creative potential, but equally enormous critical issues. And old questions come back into play: what makes an individual an artist? Are we facing a new stage of creative evolution, with a radically effective instrument, or are we witnessing the end of an era that for millennia has marked the relationship between man and the musical instrument? But these questions, and all the questions to which they refer, are evidently material for in-depth analysis which cannot find space here.
🎤 How were the various male and female voices of the various songs, all of very different genres, in full “Art Attack style like Roberto Flauto” managed?
This aspect is very interesting. No choice in this album was random. Each time, of course, I had to specify the genre, the tone, the intensity of the voice, trying to make it suitable for my idea. Perhaps the most difficult track in this sense was Ananasssss, which is in Neapolitan. Well, this was a real challenge: making the AI sing. in the language of my city it wasn't easy, also because I had to adapt the writing by distorting the Neapolitan grammar, as the software was not designed to "read" this language. The overall result, for all fifteen tracks (even if three of these are instrumental), although it has some errors, I consider it absolutely satisfactory. I hope that those who listen to the album will also think the same way.
🎤 As FilmAmo we are creating an international community of bloggers with a strong Cinema-themed vocation: from your interesting case history of creating an Album from scratch, do you think that young authors with great cinematographic ideas but without experience in the field can make use of Ai software to create film works? Maybe by having the Ai act?
Here, you see that the theme returns, and can be extended to every area of creativity. I believe that the "game" is only just beginning. To answer your question without beating around the bush: I would say yes, young authors with good ideas who do not have sufficient budgets and means can certainly benefit from AI-based technologies. Even by having actors created from scratch by the current software "act". And the scenarios that would open up – ontological, existential, perhaps even moral – would be of extreme complexity, as suggestive as they are problematic. The future of creativity seems definitely destined (condemned?) to move in this direction. All we can do is hope that once again beauty will find a way to flourish, and make us flourish,
Dear greetings, listen to Roberto's Album <1 >
and read his Film Reviews on his FilmAmo profile 🙂
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