PJH Studios

Tag: music

  • This band doesn’t exist

    Velvet Sundown, a band with 350,000 monthly listeners, most likely doesn’t exist–a growing phenomenon enabled by AI.

    Though they’re not yet dominating the charts, disturbingly realistic AI songs are slowly but surely creeping into our headphones – and you may even be listening to them without realizing what you’re hearing. Smuggled into popular playlists and hidden in plain sight among authentic, well-known tracks, AI-generated artists with fake photos, ChatGPT-generated biographies and no genuine fans to speak of are picking up hundreds of thousands of streams.

    One such artist is The Velvet Sundown, a band with almost 350,000 monthly Spotify listeners but no discernible online presence or social media accounts. (“There’s not a shred of evidence on the internet that this band has ever existed,” as one Redditor put it.) While we can’t confirm that the band’s music is AI-generated, a glance at their artist image and bio should be enough to persuade even the least skeptical observer.

  • Octogenarians in the club

    A Brussels program to fight loneliness among senior citizens.

    Among the revelers in crop tops, short skirts and high heels, one group stood out: gray-haired retirement-home residents, many in their 80s or 90s. The men wore suits with pocket handkerchiefs, and the women, in mascara and red lipstick, wore chunky necklaces and tops with sequins.

    “Look at the atmosphere,” said Guillaume Vanderweyen, 99, who was clubbing for the first time in 40 years. “Everyone is happy because we’re doing something different. That matters in life.”

  • Making music after death

    Popular Mechanics with an interesting art installation involving posthumous brain matter to make music.

    American composer Alvin Lucier was well-known for his experimental works that tested the boundaries of music and art. A longtime professor at Wesleyan University (before retiring in 2011), Alvin passed away in 2021 at the age of 90. However, that wasn’t the end of his lifelong musical odyssey.

    Earlier this month, at the Art Gallery of Western Australia, a new art installation titled Revivification used Lucier’s “brain matter”—hooked up to an electrode mesh connected to twenty large brass plates—to create electrical signals that triggered a mallet to strike the varying plates, creating a kind of post-mortem musical piece. Conceptualized in collaboration with Lucier himself before his death, the artists solicited the help of researchers from Harvard Medical School, who grew a mini-brain from Lucier’s white blood cells. The team created stem cells from these white blood cells, and due to their pluripotency, the cells developed into cerebral organoids somewhat similar to developing human brains.

  • Review: A Visit From the Goon Squad

    ★★★★☆ [amazon_link id=”0307477479″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan[/amazon_link] – Central to the story are time, music, Bennie Salazar and Sasha. Beyond them are pasts that they share between people they’ve known and places they’ve been.  Bennie is an aging record executive and Sasha is his assistant. The story travels back and forth in time, sometimes jumping past, present and future all within a paragraph describing out people try to escape their actions despite the passage of time. The format is unorthodox, and a long chapter, told in the guise of a PowerPoint deck, comes across as amusing at first, then sobering. Jennifer Egan figured out how to wring emotional catharsis out of a PowerPoint deck. In a sense, the past catches up with all the characters presented to tell a story of transformation.