How good is the shamefully unmeaningful "Valentine Beat?"
5
resolved Feb 22
7 (great)
6
5
4
3
2
1 (needs improvement)

As the description states, this song is not designed to be awe-inspiring, thought-provoking, or award winning. If you're looking to ponder the meaning of existence, this isn't it. If you want to dance, then it might be for you.

https://soundcloud.com/steve-sokolowski-797437843/valentine-beat

This song is a radical turn from the last release, "Chrysalis," which was heavily criticized by @jim. I've used different production techniques here and attempted something completely different to see how that impacts the ratings. I'll talk about what I did after the poll closes, in a comment.

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Can your music polls have a 0 option added, please?

@KevinBlaw How about I add a -2, just for you?

voice is not underutilising model capabilities

@jim I think this is a new record score for you, isn't it? Congratulations!

In this song, I tried to use a more realistic sounding voice, from a 1920s swing song, and found that it was actually much better to intentionally heavily process the vocals. I actually generated 200 candidates for the voice alone and ended up using the first because the more processed it was, it ended up sounding better.

@jim i liked this less than the last few—is this the "inverse @jim " strategy i was told to follow?

I judged this track on less-demanding criteria (because I rated it on a scale based on its genre, and the ceiling is lower here), so I think my "six" here is not as impressive as my "five" on Six Weeks from AGI.

But yeah I liked it.

@Ziddletwix Why do you like it less than the last few and what should I improve?

@jim So the point with this song was to perform a sort of experiment - to try to fix mistakes made in previous songs that you and others pointed out, of course, but also to create something that is exactly like a typical disco song you might hear on the radio.

Unlike "Chrysalis" or "Six Weeks From AGI," there is little originality here. I intentionally rejected creative chords. The only remotely unusual part about this song is that it was written in Ab Major, which is a vastly underused key and except for "Firework," I don't know of any pop songs that are written in it. The intent is to see whether @jim and others would rate it more highly, perhaps subconsciously, because it is so similar to something Justin Timberlake or Dua Lipa would write.

I do want to know what would be done to achieve a 7 here, though.

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