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| Image by Bing AI |
The album pictured above doesn't exist yet (and probably never will), but at least I've now got a second song for it. It's basically an electronic arrangement of Gilbert & Sullivan's "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General" from The Pirates of Penzance, with reworded lyrics covering all the clichés of modern ufology that I could think of. The synthesized vocals aren't always clear, so you need to see the words on the screen to follow them, but apart from that I'm really quite proud of this one. So do please have a listen to it before reading any further!
A typical song has 8 syllables per line, with pairs of lines rhyming on the last syllable. But this one has 16 syllables per line (which isn't a problem) and rhymes on the last three syllables - which is a problem, at least for me. In the original by W. S. Gilbert, he makes it look easy, with rhymes like "lot o' news ... hypotenuse" and "Sir Caradoc's ... paradox". In my version, I was quite pleased with "Zeta Reticuli ... particu'ly" and "there was a clash ... saucer crash", but a lot of the others are distinctly strained (such as "correct approach ... rectal probe" and "disastrous course ... astronauts"). Then again, I think there's a sense in which these almost-but-not-quite rhymes add to the humour!
As I often do with these musical experiments, I beta-tested it on five friends - and this was the first one that's ever come back with five "yeses". One person (who liked it enough to share it on Twitter/X, despite describing an earlier song of mine as "tuneless wibbling") raised the interesting question of what a "ufologist" should be called, now that the US government has deprecated UFO in favour of UAP. I suspect the answer is that UAP will very soon (if not already) come to be associated with "debunkers" who seek to explain sightings in non-extraterrestrial terms, leaving UFO for the true believers - who will thus always be ufologists.
Also on the subject of feedback, I can't resist including this nice comment from my cousin - I never knew such specialized emojis existed!
The singing synthesizer I use is a Japanese one called Sinsy, which is actually a deep neural network (i.e. AI) that gets better the more it's exposed to training data. It's been updated a couple of times since I started using it in 2020, and has improved noticeably in that time. For example, the synthesized voice doesn't sound nearly as good in my previous UFO-themed song, which I did in 2022 for my book The Science of Music.
One of the topics in that book is "algorithmic composition" - specifically the use of Markov chains. If that's something you've never heard of, it simply means analysing a piece of music to work out its "transition matrix" - the probability that any given note will be followed by any other particular note - and then getting a computer to generate a new piece of music using the same transition probabilities.
Since the editors wanted a focus on well-known music, the transition matrix I used came from Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You". This was something of an in-joke, since he was busy extricating himself from a plagiarism accusation at the time, so I thought he wouldn't mind if I borrowed his transition probabilities (the fact that his song only uses five different notes made the maths easier, too). For the lyrics, I dug out some UFO-themed limericks I wrote ages ago, and called the result "Mark of (Markov - get it?) the UFO". Apart from the rather strange synthesized vocals, I think it sounds quite good. Here it is:
10 comments:
If you feign a hoax, AM, does that mean it's real? H'mm, a little ambiguous perhaps?
The second one didn't really grab me, but I thought the words of the first one were quite clever. Well done.
Thanks Kid! Looking at my stats, I think you're the 6th person (other than myself) to hear the new song, so I can still claim 100% positive feedback. That's the good news - the not-so-good news is that, looking at the stats, no one else seems to have viewed this post yet. Very frustrating that the "creative" posts that require most work also consistently get the fewest views.
As for the second (chronologically first) song - three-quarters of the words were written, in slightly different form, as standalone limericks back in 2008 (the originals are here: https://www.andrew-may.com/ufo.htm). I added a fourth for balance when I turned them into a song, but the bit you're talking about is from one of the originals. Even so, I do have a vague memory that even when I wrote it I was conscious that "a hoax that’s feigned" is a bit of a double-negative!
Very good, Andrew, but, as you mentioned, the electronic voice in the first video was often difficult to understand and the pink printed lyrics could also be difficult to see against the background but I managed. Interesting that the electronic voices all had German accents by the way.
Do you know the song 'No Doubt About It' by Hot Chocolate? It's about a man encountering a UFO and it's my favourite UFO-related pop song (it was a big hit too, reaching No.2 in the singles chart in 1980).
Thanks Colin - I wasn't aware of that song but I've just listened to it on YouTube. Impressively cerebral lyrics for a top ten hit!
Sorry you had difficulty reading the lyrics of my video, but they're clear enough on my screen so I wasn't aware there might be a problem. But that "German" accent is a really weird thing. The software is actually Japanese, and if you use it at female pitch it really does sound quite Japanese (something I deliberately exploited in my "Guru" song - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOe6s9bDXh8). But for some reason, when lowered to a male pitch it starts to sound German! I first noticed this when I did my "rock" version of Schubert's Erlkonig (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3nvuNC19vk). That song's based on a story from German folklore, and although I translated the words into English, I think it sounds great in a German accent!
Speaking of songs about UFOs, I still have my original 45rpm single of 'A Spaceman Came Travelling' by Chris de Burgh, which I bought when it first came out in, I think, 1976. Is this a record? (Ho-ho, little joke there.)
Maybe I should do a blog post about UFO-themed songs some day, Kid. Anyway, I've just added it to my "new blog ideas" list while I think about it!
Andrew, I watched the first video again but this time I went to YouTube rather than just clicking on your link and I blew the video up to full-screen size so the pink lyrics were much easier to read on second viewing.
A post on UFO pop songs would be a good idea. I remember when SFX magazine did an article on that very subject and they listed a number of UFO and outer-space themed songs but didn't include the Hot Chocolate masterpiece I mentioned above! Another UFO song I like is 'Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft' by The Carpenters (but it was written and originally sung by Klaatu).
Thanks Colin - glad to hear you found the lyrics easier to read the second time. I think you've mentioned "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft" previously on this blog. At least some "anonymous" person has, and it looks like your writing style - https://forteana-blog.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-somerset-space-walk.html. Even if you never read my books, the flow of ideas does sometimes work the other way around, as this particular snippet of information (specifically the Carpenters link) found its way into The Science of Sci-Fi Music (which not surprisingly has a whole chapter about UFO-themed songs). From pages 109-110:
Also worth mentioning is the Canadian band Klaatu, formed in 1973 and briefly rumoured to be the Beatles under a new name. Of course they weren’t — but was their most famous song, “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” (better known in a cover version by the Carpenters), a clue to their true identity? As Andy Roberts wrote in Fortean Times in 1996: "If Klaatu weren’t the Beatles who were they? Well, numerologist John Squires studied the hieroglyphs on their Hope album and determined that the band were in fact extraterrestrials."
I clicked on that link, Andrew, and yes it's me who mentions 'Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft' - if you read your reply you'll see that you call me Colin. The reason my comment is now anonymous is because I deleted the Google account I was using at the time so my name vanished from alongside all the comments I'd made using that account but at least the comments themselves didn't disappear.
Ah, thanks Colin - that explains it. As you say, a good thing it didn't delete the comment altogether! I searched my blog for that song title, because I was pretty sure it had been mentioned before, and when I found the "anonymous" comment mentioning it I did scroll down the thread to see if I referred to you as Colin. But it never occurred to me to scroll backwards through the thread as well!
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