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How good are the music AIs?

Perhaps one for Norman here. Bloke on M4 might know the tech but mebbe not the music.

So, just one of those things that crosses the mind. There are songs out there that would be fun to hear in other ways. How easy is it to do this?

Sure, there have been algos to turn any three notes into a Bach fugue for decades.

But, say. I’d like to hear what a strong male but high voice – so, a counter-tenor. We don’t have castrati, which is good, but nor do we have any decent recordings of those last voices. There is one, I think, but not good. I’ve seen around that a studio way to mimic is to run a female voice (a what, coloratura? Soprano? We’re already seeing the limits of my knowledge here) in parallel with the counter tenor. The pairing is, so online says, pretty close to the castrati.

But, so, that voice. A capella. Full volume, belting it. But doing Van Morrison’s “Crazy Love”. Might be very odd to bad and terrible. But, you know, maybe. I’d just like to hear it.

Is music AI good enough to do that yet? Here’s this song (and if necessary, find the sheet music for it to feed in), gimmie a capella castrati?

At a guess you’d want to be able to edit. This particular idea has been in my head for a couple of days and sforza and dimuendo varies as I play it through. When the HEAVENS Open and etc. Yes I NEED her in the morning, Yes I need HER in the night etc. You know, actual musician, singer, stuff as well as the mechanical playback.

So, if that can be done, what about Can’t Find My Way Home? The arrangement from Blind Faith, with the two guitars. Would that translate into a dual harpsichord arrangement?

And, ‘N’, ‘n’……how far has this tech got so far?

Oh. Right.

So my necessary response to what is happening is that something as critical to our national infrastructure as the supply of internet services should be under state control.

Aren’t we all looking forward to that?

The supply of internet services in a country like the UK represents a natural monopoly because the duplication of the cabling required to get internet into most houses in this country cannot be achieved affordably, and so any veneer of competition is virtually meaningless.

And yet the duplication of local cabling still happens…..and there’s satellite, mobile and so on.

Sounds like a good thing

As I’ve been known to point out this seems like a good thing:

AI-generated child sexual abuse material is proliferating online, with the amount of illegal material investigated this year already exceeding the total for 2025.

Analysts at the Internet Watch Foundation have found more photorealistic child sexual abuse material in the first half of 2026 than for the whole of the prior year. The UK-based IWF, which monitors abuse material globally, said it had assessed 6,310 AI images that met the legal definition of child sexual abuse, 40% higher than last year’s total of more than 4,500.

As best we know imagery is a substitute for, not complement to, illegal sexual activity. So, the more AI porn out there the less kiddie fiddling. Whether this should be so, is righteous to be so, is another matter, the best empirical evidence we’ve got says it is so.

Of course, the official demand is “Stop it!”.

The IWF said the figures underlined the need for new statutory regulation on AI.

Sigh.

What inequity?

Andy Burnham has rightly received plaudits for facing up to issues that politicians have for too long shied away from. Whether it’s fixing the inequity of England’s social care system

People with money spend their money. People without get it free. We may or may not like that system, might think it could be improved, but it’s difficult to think that this is inequitable.

I’m beginning to think that the whole idea is not about social care at all. It is, rather, an excuse to be able to raise taxes. For the system being talked about is that everyone gets their care costs paid for, the richer still have to pay their hotel costs and the poor get them free. But the tax rise to “pay” for this is going to be whacking.

Seems like a fair guess

Jim Chanos, whose firm has previously placed bets against Tesla, Wirecard and the Chinese property sector, said in an interview with The Observer, that he was betting against “most of the neoclouds” – smaller companies that let out AI computing capacity – because they are “valued as tech growth stocks when, in fact, they’re highly leveraged landlords”.
Many neoclouds are former bitcoin mining companies that have borrowed heavily in order to turn to the business of buying AI chips and land for data centres, before renting the computational power out to companies such as OpenAI. Neoclouds including CoreWeave, Nebius and TeraWulf have all become targets for short sellers betting that demand for the assets they lease will fall.

I’m always wary of companies that change their business line. Yes, this has its problems – Apple’s move from computers to phones worked pretty well, as did Nokia’s from gumboots to phones.

On the other hand, those who go from yesterday’s fashion today to today’s fashion tomorrow, hmm. Perhaps they’re being most agile in riding the current waves of interest. Or, perhaps, there’s nothing there except that fashion.

Typical lefties

But there is a recourse, albeit improbable and outlandish, that fulfils all the criteria of restitution, if not retribution. The new football regulator has the power to strip rogue owners of their position and force them to sell up. This sounds like a good punishment. But market intelligence suggests City are worth about £4bn now, compared with about £200m when the Abu Dhabi United Group took over in 2008. What kind of punishment enables the perpetrators to walk away with a 20-fold profit on their investment, much of which can be attributed to their cheating?

No, City should not be sold; they should be taken back. Requisition. Nationalise. Give them some patriotic name such as the Great British Manchester Football Club.

Something has happened. Quick, steal it!

Note what he really is saying. It’s worth £4 billion. Thaty’s *why* we should not just punish them but must steal it.

Really?

Exports of crude from the strait of Hormuz have largely returned to levels seen before the outbreak of the Iran war, as oil producers and the shipping industry have found alternative ways of transporting crucial fuel out of the Middle East.

Not something I would have expected. Yes, sure, there will be workarounds, markets do that. But back to normal? Impresses even me that flexibility of markets.

Refined products not so much as yet. And I’d assume there are still considerable problems with LNG. But crude back to normal? Ho well…..

Could describe any politician with this

Since the start of his second presidency, Donald Trump has often launched outlandish conspiratorial attacks on critics and foes that mock them and label their views as hoaxes, prompting scholars and legal experts to say Trump’s attacks endanger US freedoms, public health and science.

Trump’s extensive use of conspiracy theories is the hallmark of an authoritarian leader that has weakened trust in the coming midterm elections, dangerously ignored scientific evidence, and often pushed for prosecutions of his political enemies in ways that seriously erode civil liberties, say critics.

They, the them, they’re out to get us! St Maggie! The Capitalists! The Joos! Neoliberals!

Standard practice….

Cretin

But there will be a price to returning, and the biggest of those might be a demand that we join the euro. The loss of economic monetary sovereignty that might arise as a consequence might be a price not worth paying, albeit that interest rates in the Eurozone have been consistently lower than those in the UK because the Bank of England has so determinedly kept rates in this country artificially high to attract hot money into the City of London, whilst deliberately suppressing growth and employment in this country.

Inflation’s higher here than in the eurozone. So nominal interest rates are.

This is fascinating

Some really looks at the rise of the Nazis in an electoral sense:

I think that’s a platitude that simply isn’t true. Because in 1930 Hitler wasn’t the original, he was a washed-out copy of what was offered by the DVP or the DNVP. The DNVP ran a more antisemitic campaign than Hitler, and yet it was the biggest loser of the election, shedding 7.3% of the vote.

Worth reading in full.

Ouch

Tennessee woman on death row taken to hospital after surviving two lethal injections
Christa Pike, sentenced to death over 1995 murder, was heard snoring 40 minutes after lethal doses administered, witnesses said

Executing someone 30 years later somehow violates my own sense of good sense. Not that I’d go to the barricades on this, nor necessarily hold the position if really pressed. But swift and vicious maybe, a generation later seems not quite right somehow.

The Tennessee Department of ​Correction later confirmed that Pike had survived the state’s effort to execute her, saying “the lethal ⁠injection chemical in the protocol has consistently been effective, ​and ​the protocol does ​not allow for additional procedures beyond what ​was carried ‌out this ​evening.”

“Christa ​Pike has been transported to an off-site medical facility,” the statement concluded.

It’s always one of those little things that gets me, that they’re going to have to take care of her, cure her, before they try again.

It’s a fair summation

But on Wednesday evening Donald Trump told reporters the incident remained unclear, after he had spoken to Netanyahu. “It seems as though the co-pilot was perhaps a terrorist or perhaps a whack-job, and he stabbed the pilot,” the US president told reporters in the Oval Office.

Beats the mumblings of everyone else as an encapsulation.

In what have been hailed as acts of tremendous bravery, several passenger rushed the cockpit of the flight and wrestled the controls from the alleged attacker even as the plane descended sharply, managing to eventually taking control and stabilising the plane before making an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia.

And, well, you know? Agreed, it’s not cowardice:

A video shared by the prime minister’s office showed passenger Yaniv Hayoun, a plumber, speaking to Netanyahu at length about how the events on board played out.

Hayoun told the prime minister how he and other passengers heard screaming and felt the air pressure change as the plane dived before they forced their way into the cockpit and found the attacker at the instrument panel.

“I grabbed the attacker, put him in a chokehold, and dragged him out first,” Hayoun said during the meeting with Netanyahu after the plane had landed safely and the passengers were flown to Israel.

As others wrestled with the attacker, Hayoun said he grabbed the controls and pulled them the way he had seen on television. Then other crew members took over.

Yet the lesson has, I think, been learned. Those who sat in their seats for fear of something worse all died anyway on 9/11. Therefore folk don’t sit in their seats anymore. Or at least, enough don’t.

And as a personal thing, given history, the one group of people I’d not expect to simply await, passively, their fate is Israeli Jews. Learnt that lesson, fight back anyway.