We got to know Lucy Dreams back in June when they released their single “Dreamland”.
This group’s song creation process is particularly interesting because one of the members is an A.I. named Lucy. All songs are approached like experiments, seeing what Lucy is able to interpret and how A.I. works and builds off of the material that the group’s human members feed it.
The result is something in the intersection between 80’s New Wave and modern “new age” rock like The Flaming Lips.
I had never heard of a band or musician using A.I. as a band member before meeting Lucy Dreams. Considering the atypical nature of their songwriting process, I thought it would be valuable to get some insight:
*The following process is written by Lucy Dreams:
We compose our songs together with our artificial band member Lucy, a system of analogue and digital effects. The former are various effect pedals, the latter are applied in the DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) Logic Pro.
In our experiments, we send random sounds through this chain of effects, this system, this A.B. and let it work its magic.
The information fed includes the classics of electronic and rock music, but also Mozart, Beethoven and everything that Vienna is heralded for. We then just proceed to record ambient noise, street noise and nature.
We send those sounds into the DAW via a cinch cable attached to a record player, or alternatively via a microphone. The original sounds then pass the analogue effects (into an Ibanez CF7, a Boss RV-6, a multi-effect pedal and the Chase Bliss blooper) and go through a fixed template of settings in our DAW.
This system then lets these sounds grow to become oceans of noise, a wall of sound. We often let Lucy process for 10 – 15 minutes, by then you mostly start to hear certain patterns and melodies in these sounds.
By slightly altering the parameters of the digital effects we can then stress and intensify those patterns or melodies to make them more prominent. Once prominent enough, we record them and use them as a basis for a new song.
Check out Lucy Dreams’ new music video, “Silver Lines”:
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