Audiobus: Use your music apps together.
What is Audiobus? — Audiobus is an award-winning music app for iPhone and iPad which lets you use your other music apps together. Chain effects on your favourite synth, run the output of apps or Audio Units into an app like GarageBand or Loopy, or select a different audio interface output for each app. Route MIDI between apps — drive a synth from a MIDI sequencer, or add an arpeggiator to your MIDI keyboard — or sync with your external MIDI gear. And control your entire setup from a MIDI controller.
Download on the App StoreAudiobus is the app that makes the rest of your setup better.
Something Different: An artificial intelligence voice I made tackles Lovecraft’s Nemesis
“I have seen the dark universe yawning / Where the black planets roll without aim.”
https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/poetry/p121.aspx
Elevenlabs.io needs just ten snippets of audio, (ideally, 25) one minute or less, to create an original voice which you can then use to read any text you care to write, or, in this case, cut and paste. So, ladies, gentlemen, and those otherwise self-identifying, I present to you H.P Lovecraft’s short poem Nemesis, delivered by a voice which, perhaps fittingly, may remind you of a sadly departed actor not unfamiliar in his roles with the dark arts of resurrection and witchcraft.
I made the backing track in AUM with several instances of Octachron driving randomised AR909, Ruismaker FM and SynthDrum drums, Flowtones and Saga synths, and the usual reverbs, mixed live into AudioShare.
Artwork is also AI: Dream, by Wombo: https://dream.ai/
Anyone noticing a trend here?
“EXPERTS: 90% OF ONLINE CONTENT WILL BE AI-GENERATED BY 2026” -
https://futurism.com/the-byte/experts-90-online-content-ai-generated
I’ve got a feeling it might happen quicker than that…
Comments
Elevenlabs is really, really good at this, which means nothing you hear can ever be trusted again.
Indeed. Wait till scammers are on the phone asking for money in the voice of your mum, your brother, best mate… just five minutes of audio grabbed off social media is enough to pull off something semi convincing…
"Mom, they're telling me they won't let me ever call you on Mother's Day again unless you immediately send them $5,000 worth of gift cards! Help!"
It sometimes seems to me we are hell bent on causing the singularity. But if a machine has no desire, will it ever truly be alive? If it isn't driven by self preservation, what will it choose to do? And why? Only what we tell it to do, or will it eventually develop something akin to a will of it's own?
Cool track. ( Showing my age calling something cool but oh well) And I think you may be right. Things are happening fast.
@MadeofWax : hey, thanks for the listen. it’s cool you think it’s cool 😎
Though really, it’s shocking I was able to cobble a somewhat recognisable voice together in a few minutes using sources swiped off the web. The ‘in house’ voices Elevenlab have are even more convincing, with little, subtle grace notes like occasional intakes of breath, hesitations and so on. If I had wanted to spend a little more time I could have approximated some of that through basic editing. Elevenlab have different ‘flavours’ of delivery too, so some of the voices sound more urgent and excited than others.
I think of a friend of mine who, because of the unusualness of his deep American voice in London, had a lucrative side hustle doing voice overs for commercial radio ads, typically a regular source of income for bottom rung actors starting out.
But it won’t be long before these AI voices come with on screen sliders for speed, and ‘excitement’ or ‘coolness’, letting an end user dial in any affect they want. I think the days of my friend’s side hustle are coming to an end…
If an artificial intelligence demonstrates self-interest like a real person, it is truly alive... and get ready for Armageddon. But we have at least another 7-10 years before that happens...
I did an online mandatory corporate training course yesterday. They didn't bother hiring a voice actor to reiterate to me the company ethics and how pilfering a paperclip is just a hair breadth away from a prosecutable offence, they used a synthesised voice instead.
It was tough enough to have to click through pages of bland corporate do goodism espousing things that made them different that every other large organisation champions too, but to make it even more impersonal by using a synthesised voice, they really doubled down on the faceless corporate overlord vibes.
I love not working at a large company anymore. Good luck there.
A haunting and hellish thing you have created here @Svetlovska. I was about to stop playing it after about a minute, but very gradually the tone becomes subdued, like a centuries–old, weary vampire retelling his life story. I can feel the hope being leached from my being as his utterances hypnotize. I abandon my soul under the vast shadow that envelopes me.
@Blipsford_Baubie : “the hope being leached from my being”? My work here is done. Mwa-ha-ha, etcetera…
Yes, I noticed that too. An artefact of the process that I couldn’t control, I too noticed how the Dead Actor starts in a confident, familiar, almost proud tone, then modulates into something flat and drained, a zombie ghost-voice, as if realising his once world-famous, now silenced, voice had been conjured, resurrected, against his will, wrenched from the silence of death, and forced once more into a semblance of life, dragged from beyond the veil and pressed into unwilling servitude in trifles such as my experiment.
This was wholly unplanned, but as it happens, seemed a good fit for the subject matter of the poem, and an illustration of the wider, disturbing ethical issue this brave new world of AI deepfaked voices and appearances brings us. See also the similar fate which befell a former colleague of his, now a plaything for other hobbyists:
The dead may rest no more. A most (un)happy outcome…
I really like how you used that voice and how it sits in the mix - it opens up a lot of possibilities.
The estates of both of those performers were paid for the privilege of using their likenesses, so no one lost in the process of Lucasfilm reanimating the characters. However, as has been clearly shown in the video, the amateur using widely available deep fake software vastly outperformed the artists who spent a year or more attempting to duplicate Tarkin and Leia. I think deep fake software is now the a top choice and not an afterthought at Lucasfilim/Disney.
… and then I found this:
AI… what's missing is the eyebrows.
fz
Nice track btw 😇