Earlier this year, the London-based electronic producer patten released Mirage FM, which billed itself as “the first-ever album made from text-to-audio AI samples.” It was made using Riffusion, a program released in 2022 that follows a slightly more convoluted model than MusicLM: Once a user inputs a text prompt, it generates a visualization, which is then translated into an original audio file. “My engagement with making music is very much about trying to do things that prod out the possible,” says patten, who is also a Ph.D. researcher in the field of intersection with technology and art.
So when he first discovered text-to-audio was possible, even though he was supposed to be taking a break, he found himself so inspired that he made an album in his downtime. “I just started recording hours and hours of experiments,” he says. After that, he went back through it all forensically, finding small snippets that appealed to him. From those pieces, he assembled his larger work. When I ask him about his text prompts, he playfully declines to share them: “I think of them as spells, or incantations,” he says of the words he typed into Riffusion’s generative audio engine.
The result, he is quick to note, still feels like “a patten album. When you listen to it, it’s very obviously made by me. It doesn’t suddenly feel like I’m using a different system.” The prompts, he says, were just that, and in this way, patten is using text-to-audio software in much the way Donahue envisioned MusicLM serving professional musicians—as a goad to get imagination flowing, a cracked-open door to the act of real human creation.
“Making music that feels like something—people find that quite difficult to do,” patten muses. “There’s no formula for a piece of music that people find touching.” The stems he generated with his words were just raw materials, transformed by the curiosity of his gaze.
Listening to Mirage FM, it’s impossible to know where patten’s creative process begins and the snippets generated wholesale from Riffusion end. But either due to his choices or the program’s idiosyncrasies, the album has an intriguingly unfinished feel, like a workbook left open.
The album is composed of 21 glimmering shards, none of the tracks extending much past the two-minute mark. Treated voices gabble away beneath heavy processing filters, mimicking synthesizers, while synth lines cry like baby animals. Sometimes the music seems to hiccup into silence, as if nitrogen bubbles flowed through its bloodstream. The mood is dreamy, both in the “inducing reverie” sense and in its vague sense of unreality. The world it paints feels hazy, but enticing: Its contours seem to glow, a possible future thinking itself into existence.
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