Be Curious
Be Curious by Nabeel Jameel Shariff
[Verse 1]
Nowadays everybody delirious
All this abuse of technology got me furious
If I wanna survive I gotta be curious
Munchin’ the truth be delicious
Even if I sound ludicrous
Even if people think it’s humorous
I gotta make the truth ubiquitous
Use my imagination and make it glorious
Only got one shot, nothing is laborious
Keep pushing them back, that’s where the story is
Keep moving forward, we ain’t losing the fizz
We ain’t hot air, we bringin’ the rizz
How much in my pocket? That ain’t none of your biz
Rich or broke, we together on this
’Cause if we back down, then we deserve the dis
So let's level up, let’s get curious
[Pre-Chorus]
Now we just need to know where the chorus is.
[Chorus]
Tell ’em, be curious, think, don’t be furious
Be curious, don’t follow blindly
Know the truth and spread it kindly
Be curious, remember to be curious
I’m curious, aren’t you curious?
Be curious, think, don’t be furious
Be curious, don’t follow blindly
Know the truth and spread it kindly
Be curious, remember to be curious
[Verse 2]
Curiosity killed the cat
Satisfaction brought it back
Let’s grow our hearts and minds
And learn to always be kind
Be mindful and aware
This game ain’t always fair
You gotta play the cards in your hands
Shape the world with the sands
Of time, and only time will tell
And time will heal all the times you fell
Hold on to your soul, it ain’t time to sell
When the devil comes to collect, hand him a banana
Tell him to sit on it, and that he can have anotha
We’ve opened the windows
And seen the shadows
Cast by the truth, thinking deep, no time to be shallow
[Chorus]
Tell ’em, be curious, think, don’t be furious
Be curious, don’t follow blindly
Know the truth and spread it kindly
Be curious, remember to be curious
I’m curious, aren’t you curious?
Be curious, think, don’t be furious
Be curious, don’t follow blindly
Know the truth and spread it kindly
Be curious, remember to be curious
[Outro]
Be curious…
Be mindful…
Be kind…
Stay curious.
Be curious, remember to be curious
[Outro]
Be curious…
Be mindful…
Be kind…
Stay curious.
This song is written, “composed” (more like prompted), mixed, and mastered, completely by me. It is about being curious and being good, responsible humans and authors of media. The song is heavily inspired by our awesome instructor and professor, Rob, as well as all my classmates and our esteemed guest speaker, Tom.
Link to song:
Artist Statement:
What is art? What is music? To me, it is a way for me to express what is inside my soul and heart to the world, using whatever is good and necessary. It is a way for me to gift myself to God. To be useful and not a parasite. A weapon that gives me a chance to resist cruelty, despite my body.
Now see, I am not complaining. Whatever happened to me, I see it as a gift. Several years back, I was suddenly blessed with a hypermobility disease that makes it very difficult and painful to do things with my hands and body. For several years, I was mostly in bed, not being able to be excellent and useful like I used to be. I had to learn to adapt to my new situation and body. I focused on improving myself in all facets of existence: physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, etc. I did whatever I could to get back to who I was and what I used to be able to do. Things like writing, painting, coding, sports, and martial arts, all things that I loved and felt passionate about, became things that caused me severe pain. Thank God for the amazing people in my life who love and take care of me. All thanks to God and thanks to all of the people in my life, I am blessed and living a beautiful life, alhamdulilah.
But I still felt useless, like a parasite or a wounded animal that needed to be put down. I wondered how and what I could contribute to humanity, especially when humanity contributes so much to me.
Fast forward, a couple of years ago, the elephant in the room trampled all over the dreams of innocent men, women, and children, along with those who dared to dream. When I saw the corpses of human beings, cooked and mangled and placed in plastic bags, I think something inside me may have died. The little boy who believed “never again will humans hurt each other in such horrible ways” may have died that day.
And again, I felt useless. Unable to do a single thing for anyone around me. Not able to challenge bad acting, I felt myself continuously chip away. What was the bloody point of studying, acquiring knowledge and wisdom, just to sit on it at the end of the day and do nothing while the world burns and destroys itself?
Nah.
That ain’t me. I refuse to let anything shatter me, especially when I know that my lord has blessed me with such an amazing life.
One day, during this madness, one of my relatives sent me a song that a Turkish music producer made using AI tools. Link: https://www.trtworld.com/article/18208872. Immediately, I was moved and inspired by the piece and action, and thought to myself, perhaps I could do something like this.
I was always interested in making my own media; these events set something powerful in motion. After this, I decided to full send myself into making music, movies, comics, video games, whatever I could do and had the passion for, to release the knowledge inside of me to the world. And also, to finally be able to do something for my people. And all people are my people.
I remember taking an anthropology class on music a long time ago at OSU. It was about music and how, throughout history, it was used as a form of solidarity and resistance. I channeled what I had learned from that class into this new music project and started to slowly write and make songs, using AI tools to generate and help complete fully finished tracks that call people towards goodness, gratitude, patience, forgiveness, peace, unity, God, etc. I am experimenting with making music that doesn’t use any bad words or vulgarity, and that has good lyrics that call to a common standard of goodness and greatness. My goal through this project is to be able to call towards good and resist evil while also being able to provide quality entertainment that people can enjoy, even if they don’t want to focus on the messages of my media.
To make and distribute nothing but quality, I am taking music production classes at LBCC to level up my understanding of music production techniques so I can make using AI only a small part of the process, and I am also utilizing the skills of a skilled audio engineer whom I met a decade ago on a game called Destiny, and has been my brother since then.
If you guys are interested, you can check out the project here: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0XZ5sJ1cvVheJ3SJ53bGy2
For this class, I want to present a song that I wrote and had made using Suno and Bandlab. This song was written partially in class, inspired by our guest speaker. Arturo gave me a few bars, and I then went home and wrote the rest of the song. It’s something fun and quirky, but also calls to good character and doesn’t encourage bad behavior. I have utilized whatever I learned in this class in making this song, and this class itself has contributed a great deal towards its existence. I hope you guys enjoy and have fun!
AI In Music
When AI song generators first came out, they were utter trash, generating songs with a lot of artifacts and harsh frequencies that couldn’t really be just EQed out. When Suno released their models, though, all of a sudden this whole thing blew open like Pandora’s Box, and till now people are talking about it. Recently, WMG and Suno settled on a deal, and just a few weeks prior to that, Udio (another AI music gen), settled with UMG. Only folks to not have their own AI now are Sony, and we are all wondering what they’ll be doing next.
Since those days, however, AI in music has come a long way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qR4BefPvSiI
Now it’s not just about prompting or pressing buttons. We can push the envelope by using our own voice to create melodies and entire songs that can later be further tweaked, mixed, and mastered in another DAW like FL Studio, Bandlab, or even Suno’s new Studio feature.
I don’t want to be a bad actor, so I want to avoid copyright infringement and deceiving people. I want to make stuff that is high in quality and value (not slop). I see these AIs as 4D music synthesizers and calculators. They aren’t doing anything a synthesizer can’t do. It’s like a synthizser on steroids, run through an LLM, that makes iterating through tweaks and changes easy and quick. As the AIs evolve and get better, and hopefully lose their copyright infringement accusations, the quality of the output as well as the speed at which it is made will both go up. It’s like when we learned in class, there is too much content and too little time to consume all of it. In the same way, there is too much demand and not enough quality supply to keep up. AI can help with this (just look at the state of One Punch Man Season 3 right now, I feel bad for the Anime artists and the fans), and as long as we don’t use it to blatantly copy and steal from people or push slop, then it can be a beautifully powerful tool that can bridge the gap between the high demand for new and quality media and its supply.
Basically, I just want to make music and spread my message without being in pain. I can’t play musical instruments, but I can write a lot of songs, so this technology allows me to be useful and test things out with the public. It gives me a way to learn more about myself and the world, and to be able to do something risky and fun. It gives me a way to fight back.
However, some would use the technology to make something like a Hatsune Miku situation, where the “artist” doesn’t exist in real life, or those who would generate hundreds of pieces of output and publish an album a week. There are even those who will pay $3000 so they can buy their own song 3000 times and become number 1 on the Billboard chart. That’s not what I am doing. For my music, the lyrics are 100% written by me, and before I start using AI to help compensate for what I am lacking, I try to do everything I can for the output by myself first. After the piece is made, it is then sent to MikeyOnTheWay, my audio engineer, who mixes and masters the tracks for the listener’s pleasure. Hopefully, with the new WMG settlement, I’ll be able to make even better output without having to worry about stealing from other artists.
In conclusion, I hope you guys learned something about how AI in music can be a really cool, useful, and powerful tool in the hands of someone with good intentions and actions, even though in the hands of someone with bad intentions, it can be devastating, like a DDOS attack on our culture and economy. Hopefully, we find a way to balance these things out so we can continue paving the way towards an exciting and prosperous future, not just for us, but also for those who will inherit what we leave behind. Remember, mates, stay curious!
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