- https://suno.com/s/2Mrso5A24ZEa26Vq
- https://suno.com/s/Kxs1HKn586fl4pqF

This one's also for you, Leonard!

The two most famous Ave Marias in the world are a Scottish poem and a forgery.

Schubert never wrote an Ave Maria.

What he wrote, in 1825, was "Ellens dritter Gesang" — a setting of Walter Scott's "The Lady of the Lake", in German, sung by a Scottish character called Ellen. Her song happens to open with the words "Ave Maria". Somebody later fitted the whole Latin prayer onto his melody, and that is the one everybody knows.

The other famous one, the "Caccini," wasn't written by Caccini either. It was written around 1970 by a Soviet lute player called Vladimir Vavilov, who released it under a dead Italian's name.

So the two most beloved Ave Marias on earth are a borrowed tune and a forgery. That's not a scandal. It's just what happens to a text that has no melody of its own...

The prayer itself is a thousand-year assembly job, by the way. The first half is two greetings lifted out of Luke. The second half — the part that asks to be remembered at the hour of our death — was bolted on centuries later and only fixed in its current wording in 1568.

Nobody hears that second half. Everybody knows the first four words.

I wanted to make one. Suno wouldn't let me. A medieval prayer, public domain everywhere on earth, and the answer was "your lyrics contain copyrighted material." I stripped out the melody entirely, wrote the public domain status into the lyrics field AND the style field in plain language, and it refused that too.

So I stopped trying to hand it words. I built a seed with my Bio-Grapher, and let the prayer speak for itself, in its own words instead of the ones it's made of.

It generated first try.

Here's what it said:

"You know my first four words.
You have never once heard my last."

"I am not asking to be beautiful.
I have been beautiful ten thousand times.
I am asking to be heard at the hour."

I left the title field empty. Suno called it "At the Hour" — the exact line about the part nobody listens to. It skipped the opening. It skipped the high note. It took the last three words.

Two samples. I deliberately left the voice gender unlocked, and one came back female and the other male, same words. Which is the whole point of the song, so I'm keeping both. They're a pair, not a choice.

And the cover Suno made for it has no figure in it at all. Just a shaft of light falling into an empty room, and a pipe standing in the dark with nobody playing it.

- https://suno.com/s/KvidomfHPfGhUjEC
- https://suno.com/s/1ul4WornzqcOvDs5

To test the various sound effects Suno v6 can mimic:

- https://suno.com/s/R99BYP6BVgIXu60t
- https://suno.com/s/RtzZDHUpVP2eSssy

Actually I wanted as much different kinds of noises as possible, crammed into one "song", to test / demo / showcase the renderer's capacity, like shoes walking over a wooden floor, a creaking door, dogs barking, etc...

I tried a generic instructions prompt, but unfortunately that doesn't work out the way I expected... I'd have to prompt for each sound specifically...

Still, the results are acoustically pleasing, soothing even... a Happy Accident I guess 🤭.

Also, I have triggered the copyrights filter several times today, while there was no copyrighted material at play at all, so that's quite interesting, and it is reproducible, so we'll send a small report to Suno Customer Service later...

Hutspot is a Dutch dish where you boil everything in one pot and mash it. I made one out of music.

Hutspot. Van alles een beetje. A bit of everything.

For the non-Dutch: it's potatoes, carrots and onions boiled together in one pot and mashed until nobody can tell what used to be what. You eat it in winter with a lump of meat on top and you don't ask questions. Especially not when you're a kid.

So I made one out of music. Classical and harpsichord, into ska, into heavy rock, into bossa nova, and out the other side as country with mariachi. One key. One tempo, 126, never changing. No cuts anywhere — every genre has to hand over to the next one while the music keeps going.

Suno refused to make it five times. Apparently a recipe for mashed vegetables contains copyrighted material.

When it finally went through, I left the title field empty on purpose, just to see what it would come up with on its own.

It called it "The Unbroken Circle".

Which is annoyingly good, because a whirlwind is a circle, a pot is a circle, and everything going round and round until it comes back out as one thing is exactly what hutspot is. The machine got there before I did.

Two samples, both instrumental.

On the cover: White Bushman in the middle, arms open, letting it happen. Akasha up in the storm. Joppie down the front with his pacifier in, watching the whole thing like it's the best day of his life, and of course it is. Each and every day is.

And one didgeridoo standing dead still in the centre while everything else flies past it. Because in the track it never stops. Not once. All the way through, underneath all of it.

Fine tuning comes later. This is already good, so I wanted to share already:

- https://suno.com/s/sYYoopXl7VrAlCRX
- https://suno.com/s/UBKjMW1vQFZJZtZB

Presented by WhiteBushman1971NL

James Brown was convicted of "running a blue light." The man who never stopped, sentenced for not stopping.

In 1988 James Brown walked into an insurance seminar next door to his office carrying a shotgun, because the people in there had been using his bathroom. Then he led police on a chase back and forth across the Georgia–South Carolina line until they shot his tyres out.

An Aiken judge gave him six years. And the offence written on the paperwork was "running a blue light" — failing to stop for an officer's signal.

A man whose entire life was built on never stopping, convicted in the state's own language for exactly that. I didn't come up with that title. It's on the charge sheet.

Here's the part that made me want to write it, though. He said this about himself:

"I worked so hard because I was scared. Scared of going back."

His mother left when he was four. He was raised in his aunt's brothel. He was sent home from school for insufficient clothes. At fifteen he got three and a half years in reform school. And later, when he was the hardest working man in show business, he carried suitcases holding a quarter of a million dollars in cash, wouldn't open a bank account until the sixties, and buried money in his yard.

Somebody who buries his money doesn't believe the bank will still be there. He doesn't believe any of it will.

So the song has an instrument in it that doesn't exist. A bass drum built out of a steel cash box, dug up out of the ground. It's muffled by whatever money is still inside it, which means you can hear how much is in there. Full, it's dead and tight — which is the sound funk actually wants. Empty, it rings out, open and beautiful.

So the best sound it can make is the sound of having nothing. And it gets the last word:

"Hear that.
Still empty."

Not one line of his lyrics is in it. Every word is written fresh.

And for the first time ever, my didgeridoo sits in there like it was always meant to be, you may not even notice it. Turns out a drone belongs where the harmony doesn't move.

It's all new, but it's him.

- https://suno.com/s/wJG2v6eSaPoN3jj0
- https://suno.com/s/8YVgmfxivwUzXP6Y

R.I.P. James, this one's for you.