A family AI Adventure with GrimesAI, KaiberAI, and TURBO Toad
Earlier this year, the music artist Grimes opened the world of AI to fellow musicians in an unprecedented way. She unveiled a platform that lets artists freely use her AI-generated voice, with clear guidelines. This piqued the interest of a tech-enthusiast musician like me, so I decided to get to work and produce a song. I invited my eight-year-old daughter Ella along for the journey which we believe is worth sharing.
The project quickly grew beyond our initial scope. What was meant to be a simple “duet” featuring Ella and GrimesAI evolved into a sprawling narrative complete with characters, heroes, and their epic journeys.
Before we invite you into our newly created Universe, let me tell you a bit about our process and the AI companions we’ve invited into our team.
The Process
GrimesAI
We ran Ella’s 2021 vocal stems through GrimesAI, which resulted in an exciting musical output. She was only six at the time of the recording.
Initially Ella wanted to re-record new vocals but I managed to convince her not to for two main reasons: 1) her original vocal on the 2021 release “Control The Memes” is already loved by many, and 2) when she was six, Ella had a really distinctive lisp — Grimes has one too.
Memeful Percussion
Not many musical things have entered the memes ‘hall of fame’. One of those is the iconic Cat Vibing To Ievan Polkka video — the soundtrack of many memes, particularly Bitcoin ones.
I fed GrimesAI two darbuka samples; the original, and a remixed one I created for the new version of the track. We were thrilled with the results.
KaiberAI
Kaiber popped up on my Twitter radar in the web3 music community circles. Producing music videos is a challenge for most music artists, often taking more time and money than the song itself. Kaiber aims to solve this problem, and so far they’ve done very well!
Initially just wanting to create a cover for our song, we employed an improvised green screen and basic lighting. Ella’s natural playfulness and ease before the camera facilitated an effortless capture of some 10 minutes of footage, which I then cleaned up and prepared for KaiberAI.
Once we started seeing the outputs from KaiberAI we were prompted to develop new characters: Grimella, the main hero of our story, and QuantumBeat, her faithful companion.
The inspiration and reference picture for QuantumBeat was QuantumLeap, the mascot of the AI-created crypto token, $TURBO, which is in itself a fascinating story; TLDR is that it was created publicly on Twitter by a Melbourne-based artist Rhett Mankind by prompting ChatGPT for the best way to fairly launch a cryptocurrency project.
Prompt after prompt, we worked in Kyber to create something that reflects the vibe we had in mind. Retrofucturistic, schematic, a bit 60s/70s pinball comic, a bit steampunk. I went through thousands of frames, photoshop cleanups, prep, sync, frame by frame to create a series of animated QuantumBeat personas. Here’s an animated cover of the Resonator, one of four Quantum Beat personas:
Creating a narrative with characters wasn’t the original intent. Originally aimed at creating a simple music video and cover art, we found ourselves with countless minutes of Kaiber AI-generated content. These AI outputs weren’t mere outcomes but prompts that sparked new stories and characters. Little did we know that we’d end up with an expansive series of art pieces that sparked a new set of stories and ideas.
Grimella & QuantumBeat: The Story
Grimella and QuantumBeat, our central characters, embark on a cosmic adventure, liberating creative spirits from the shackles of Control, and empowering them to embrace self-expression.
Grimella
Grimella wasn’t always the Infinite Dancer! As a child, she was always told to restrain her wild, dancing spirit, yet, the rhythm was a calling she couldn’t ignore.
This dancing dynamo was plagued by a phantom beat that only she could hear. It was a call for her to lose control that she found increasingly hard to resist, driving her to the brink of madness.
Resourceful Grimella, pressured by those around her to stay in control, found a way to silence the beat — by creating her own rhythm that is so mundane, so uninspiring, that it would help her regain control. But each victory left her feeling hollow.
But then came the day the trick failed. The beat synced with her very being at a quantum level, awakening the Infinite Dancer that had lain dormant within Grimella all this time.
It was in this moment of pure, resonating rhythm that Grimella discovered the origin of the beat. A truth, a journey, and a destiny that would change everything!
QuantumBeat
QuantumBeat — a Turbo Space Toad, a faithful companion and a game-changing ally, has watched over Grimella since her birth, shifting forms and modulating rhythms — on a mission to free Grimella from the chains of Control.
As a master of synchronization and resonance, Quantum tirelessly tried countless beats, combinations, and iterations.
The day Quantum found the perfect beat was a turning point. By dropping THAT ONE BEAT THAT SYNCS, he not only unleashed Grimella, The Infinite Dancer, but also set a chain of events into motion…
Quantum’s QuantumBeat triggered a portal into the physical world. Now, Quantum can aid Grimella directly, using all his cosmic skills to defy the forces of control!
Quantum’s most favored weapon against control? Shapeshifting! A skill that is sure to keep their enemies guessing while they dance to the rhythm of freedom!
Their first adventure
Is yet to be written. Ella and I still haven’t interacted with ChatGPT to develop the story, but we did come up with the following narrative:
In their FutureLab, Grimella & Quantum keep a vigilant eye on the multiverse, scanning timelines for ‘memergencies’ — moments of weakness when people suppress their self-expression due to Control’s influence.
Control, the Evil Overlord, exploits human vulnerability, offering them a false dichotomy: win or lose. His strategy? Planting tasteless, odorless choices at their most vulnerable moments.
Our heroes, armed with memeful memes and music, combat Control’s influence, helping people to continue expressing themselves and follow their passions.
Through Grimella, we tell the tale of self-expression, the importance of letting go of control, and the struggle therein. QuantumBeat embodies the creative companion, enabling better and fuller self-expression, resonance, and sync.
Infinite game
This narrative wasn’t written by AI.
Something much much more interesting happened.
AI prompted us.
Armed with ideas from interacting with AI companions, the storyline came to us the old school way — by talking over a game of Spit we played while waiting for her brother Djani one day.
In retrospect, I’d say that the Grimella & QuantumBeat story represents our experiences and echoes the struggle of artists navigating the contemporary world, yearning for that perfect sync with creativity, while grappling with the eternal tension between art as a gift, and art as a commodity.
Thinking back on how we came up with this story, exposes an interesting connection to where we’re at as humans, artists and creatives at this particular moment in time. With an explosion of easily accessible AI companions, there’s a good chance we’ve just been served a ticket to a giant disco, where everyone, eventually, gets an opportunity to sync up with that “one beat”.
CONTROL THE MEMES — The Single
This journey has been unforgettable, combining Grimes’s pioneering efforts, our innovative exploration, and Ella’s youthful energy that helped me welcome AI into our creative space as a companion.
The song “CONTROL THE MEMES” is inspired by memes as important cultural artifacts that bring us together. What a kick drum in a dance does for our bodies sync, memes do for our minds.
Sync.
P.S. Big thanks to Jamie Stevens for his help and guidance during production, and Ledfut for mastering the song.
Digital Artifacts
We’ve created quite a few digital artifacts along our journey; a variety of Grimella personas, a collection of animated QuantumBeats, and the song itself.
We’ve reached out to Grimes to seek some clarity on minting these as NFTs. Details TBA!
Thank you for reading our story!
Dundo & Ella
