Anthems for a
Post-Hype Era
From holiday card
to concept album:
An AI experiment gone right.
What started as a fun mission to outdo the
AI-generated holiday cards I’ve sent the last few years turned into something stranger, funnier, and unexpectedly revealing.
Part of the fun (and the danger) of working with generative AI is the power of "strategic serendipity" (once you set the machine in motion), it doesn’t just follow instructions; it can take us down new paths.
When you assemble a small army of specialist bots (producer, record-label exec, lyricist, plus Sumo as the "musician") and let them do what AI does best: iterate relentlessly, remix patterns, and manufacture plausible novelty at scale… the creative output can far exceed the initial scope.
What emerged was genuinely impressive. Songs were drafted, discarded, refined. Genres were debated. Hooks were iterated. Along the way, a holiday song became a seven-track concept album about everything that's broken in our industry... and what it might look like to fix it.
This project is three things at once: a fun holiday experiment, a marketing gimmick (yes, obviously), and a showcase for how potent AI can be.
One of the first things the bots did was analyze Top 40 / Pop music to develop a "rubric for popular music". While some humans may have obscure musical tastes, the majority of people are pretty predictable and today's pop music follows very specific formulas.
I can't ignore the irony of the current moment: while the consulting industry uses "formulaic templates" to sell high-priced advice, the music industry has long been doing the same to manufacture "real songs" in rigid studio environments.
If you’ve listened to enough radio, you already know the formula exists. I can only guess what terms like BPMs, double-time percussion, tonal centers, RMS levels, crest factor, and bus density mean, but watching the bots debating these details when "designing a song" showed that "artistry" was actually pretty scientific.
Are these songs “good”? I honestly don’t know. I am the first to admit I am not a "music guy." and am likely the last person qualified to judge their artistic merit. However, in an era where thousands of songs are engineered to fit precise rigid patterns, using predictable blueprints, are these "artificial" songs any less authentic than the status quo.
If this makes you slightly uncomfortable, consider it a provocation and preview of Vorpal Hedge.
Sit back, listen, and laugh to the Soundtrack of a Revolution and perhaps recognize some of the grievances we’re about to solve.
Welcome to the revolution.
It won't be televised, but it does have a soundtrack.
Soundtrack of a Revolution
TRACK
01
TRACK
02
TRACK
03
TRACK
04
TRACK
05
TRACK
06
TRACK
07
Written by
"Music Critic Bot"
created using
OpenAI 5.2 API
-
Temperature: 1.4
-
Top P: 1.0
-
Presence
Penalty: 0.9 -
Frequency
Penalty: 0.5 -
n: 3
Merge pass
using Opus 4.5
Album Review
In an industry saturated with self-congratulatory case studies and impenetrable white papers, Vorpal Hedge’s debut album, Soundtrack of a Revolution, is a Molotov cocktail thrown into a stuffy boardroom. While the album is clearly a marketing gimmick, it nonetheless offers listeners a meticulously crafted musical manifesto.
Vorpal Hedge has delivered something genuinely subversive: a concept album that eviscerates the consulting industrial complex with surgical precision and surprising musicality. Soundtrack of a Revolution serves as a searing, satirical takedown of the industry's most sacred cows. From the soul-crushing drone of "PowerPoint Poison" to the frantic, ska-punk buzzword salad of "Jargon Wonderland", to the relentless motorik exhaustion of "The Transformation Treadmill" the album never lets its targets off the hook, yet somehow remains more exhilarating than bitter.
For all its cynical wit, the album is underpinned by a defiant optimism. Soundtrack of a Revolution, culminates in the rallying cry "Slay the Jabberwock," an arena-rock, anthemic closer that transforms grievance into genuine catharsis.
The album plays like a sharp satirical thriller: equal parts swagger and surgical precision, with hooks that feel anthemic but lyrics that read like a red-team report set to drums. It’s propulsive, a little menacing, and weirdly therapeutic.
Soundtrack of a Revolution is a rare and audacious project that uses the language of rock and roll to declare war on corporate mediocrity, proving that sometimes the sharpest insights don't come from a slide deck, but from a power chord.
A Methodology for
AI-Orchestrated
'Original' Music Production
THE AI MUSIC FACTORY
