Mashin Shanti (ai songs)

The problem of music-less Chinook music

As you might remember from my last post, there are plenty of Chinook songs out there waiting to be sung. In addition to the problem of not having many people to do the singing though, a lot of these songs also have only lyrics and no recorded tune.

The other day a friend was showing me a ‘generative ai’. You might be familiar with the sort that produces text or images, but did you know that there are also ones for music? I’m not usually one to use these sorts of things, but my immediate thought was that this could ne used to bring some life to these tune-less chinook songs.

To see how this would turn out I grabbed a case study, the song “tsee klootchman fly with me”. This song was recorded in the 1864-1867 journal of Arthur S. Farwell, at one time the Surveyor-General of British Columbia, but it has no music to go along with the lyrics. See Dave Robertson’s write up on this song here.

These are the lyrics as written:

tsee klootchman, fly with me
Leave behind thy light canim
And we will hyak klatawa
And seek the forest dim.
For a while forget the salt chuck
Where the silv’ry salmon play–
We will take a tenas moosum
While the daylight fades away.
Oh! Be not kwass with nika
But thy seeowist turn on me
For thou canst not fail but kumtux
That I hiyu tickie thee
Then breathe the soft nowitka
Kloshe chako to my arms
And in the forest lonely
I’ll nanitch all thy charms.
I will potlatch hiyu icktas
Nika mahkook sapolil.
Of sugar and lebiskwee
Nika mamook thee thy fill
With passesse spread beneath us
We’ll kapswalla on the ground,
Klonas you will klap a tenas
While the dew is falling down.

Making the Song

I headed over to suno.ai and plugged in the lyrics as written. Now as you might have guessed, AI is not much better at puzzling out the old style English-based spellings than your average dictionary reader. These were the first two iterations:

My initial reaction was that these songs were much better than I expected. Notice though that the Chinook is not being pronounced very well. It is taking the spelling “nika” and pronouncing it with an “ee” vowel rather than the “ay” diphthong as they write it at Grand Ronde.

So I then spent of bit of time trying to get the ai to pronounce the Chinook better. I landed on swapping out spellings like “hiyu” for sneaking in actual English words “high-you” or “kumtux” for “come-tucks”. This worked much better.

A second thought was why not try out throwing the music into a different genre. So, that’s how we ended up with this true masterpiece (lol):

Notice it is still not perfect by any stretch. It garbles the lyrics at the end and doesn’t really finish the song properly.

That said, what do you think of this application of generative ai? Do you think this is a useful tool? I understand that there are some ethical concerns with these sorts of ai, for example when they are trained on datasets taken without compensating artists. Does that mean we shouldn’t use them?

Personally I think they could stand to be improved significantly. They certainly are entertaining and interesting even in their current state though.