OCA Music: Time, Productivity and London

There are moments in the life of a creative practitioner when you glimpse yourself, as if from the outside, and are confronted by the question: Is this a productive, or even sane, use of my time?

I experienced one such moment during the creation of my latest album. I was 10 minutes in to training a podcasting software on my voice, reading from the suggested script, which was lifted from a wildlife documentary. Crucially, I was not training the software on my natural voice but on me doing a middling-to-poor impression of an American podcaster. After 10 of the recommended 15 minutes describing the wonder of the natural world with an affected twang, a certain sense of creeping uncertainty as regards my life choices did begin to sneak up on me.

The purpose of the software is to allow podcasters and ‘content creators’ to patch over unclear or missing moments using AI-generated text-to-speech conversion. Type in what you want to hear your own voice say and it will give the text its best shot, so long as you do not step outside the 500 words that can utilised in the free version. Paying options are available.

Obviously my purposes were somewhat different, though not entirely easy to define. The album, Next time ur in london, for a long time was named ‘Talkies’ in my notebook because it contained quite a few pieces that were far more text heavy than my usual work. I wanted to create a variety of voices, and an uncanny distance between the words heard and direct human expression.

The insertions from the software (including ‘apple sauce’, ‘jibber’ and ‘jabber’) only helped to increase this sense of distance in the opening track, ‘TheCityistheCityandthePeoplearethePeople’. Similarly, accurate descriptions of London and its place within British cultural life are interspersed with slices of surreality.

The result is quite unlike anything else I have created, which may be a good reason to keep questioning – approaches, ways of working, and life choices – in order to expand the range of work you make.

Next time ur in london by Neil Tòmas Smith