Apr 17, 2008
The best music in the universe
BY DERRICK SOBODASH
hose who have been stalking me might remember Manufactured the “album” byuu and I made back in the earlier part of this decade. After six years of being unavailable on the Internet in any form, I have decided to re-release our monstrosity.
Last year when the Der Langrisser translation project drew to a close, byuu and I talked about revisiting the concept and doing better songs. At the time, we were really just screwing around. The album is incredibly unbalanced, and you can figure out precisely how we learned to put this together if you listen from the first track to the last.
At the moment, the script we used to generate the songs is missing in action, but I will try to explain what we did below.
Manufactured music is nothing new. Music industry representatives regularly call random people, play a series of hooks, and based on which hooks — the repeated part of a song — are most popular, decide what music to produce. This is why nothing is ever new in mainstream music.
We decided to up the ante.
Fuck having a lyricist — we let a computer write the lyrics. Essentially, we digested the lyrics to several hundred terrible rap songs and sorted every line based on its rhyme. Our script had arrays of rhyming lines, and then would pick a rhyming pattern for the song and pull out random lines from each array to create stanzas that followed the pattern. We also tossed in a few of our own lines for fun.
In this sense, our PHP-based lyricist was more linguistically sophisticated than 90 percent of all rap music.
Just got busted by some pigz fo dealin’
Last week got busted fo dealin’
Some bitch told me I got her pregnant so I slit her throat
Fuckin’ ho got blood on my coat
Bitches like to take it in the back
Can’t blame ‘em cuz I know how to pack
We then took these lyrics and played them through the Microsoft voice synthesizer and also through AT&T’s former Web-based text to voice application. These voice samples were then spaced an laid over a backing track using Sound Forge or CoolEdit, and then sound effects were added. The backing tracks came from generic rap backings and karaoke tracks of whatever we could pull from Kazaa, then the best file sharing client.
It was a lot of fun, and byuu and I tried to one-up each other with each song. I still think “Fek Dem Bitches” was the zenith of our little project, though every song had a few priceless and unique lines.
I have uploaded a 7-zip of our original files to Megaupload. Monaural 22kHz tracks are available below.
Track List:
- How it Happens (Dirty Ole’ Cracker)
- Inbred Fedz (’Lil Yo Yo)
- Yo (Azz Bandit)
- Dirty Niggaz Fuck yo Momma (Various)
- Representin (Dirty ‘Ole Cracker)
- Fuk Dem Bitches (Dirty ‘Ole Cracker)
- Homophoebic Niggaz (Various)
- Killin Pigs (Azz Bandit)
Edit: A version of the generator has been found! It is not our final, but is still fun and gives you an idea what we were doing.
Imagine someone like Miku Hatsune singing this shit.
Hmm… Now I have a reason to get a copy of Vocaloid.
I lost those songs on a hard disk failure and I really wanted them back, homophoebic niggaz is GREAT.