Temporal Dreams is the last original piece I’ve composed. I still vividly remember my mom’s excitement when she first listened to it. At my request, she listened to it in a pitch black room with her eyes closed. With every cry of the whale and the shift in pace, she told me it was the best I’d composed so far. Well, the track was exclusively composed for her after a trek I went on! All based on the stories she told me when I was a kid. The clouds, the whale, the jungle! I was finally content that my mom truly enjoyed my track. And it was also the first track of mine that my wife listened to when we were dating.
It’s been three years and I haven’t touched my DAW since.
After losing mom, I turned to a stone! I couldn’t express emotions as well as before. That part of me, the creative and evocative one, died with her. While I struggled to cope with the grief, Saran, dad, and even my therapist tried their best to get me back into processing my emotions again. Be it through writing, music, or whatever constructive way possible, but the inertia of her loss was too much for me to express anything beyond the visceral outbursts.
And now, since losing Saran, I’m devolving by the second. Whatever left of me is gone. I can now barely write or hold a coherent conversation with people without stuttering or losing my marbles. Things like music are now so alien to me. The colours and timbres are now a mere background noise.
For the past two days, I’d been internalising a lot. It was too much and my mind was itching to bestially scream it all out and rage until I saw the light. At the right time, earlier today, I was reading about Google AI Labs and stumbled onto Google’s Lyria model.
You see, I don’t know anything about music theory nor writing songs, especially in Tamil. But I do write poems when things get too melancholic. Out of curiosity, I took a moment to seed Gemini with my existence. After lamenting and brooding for a while, I tried co-writing an elegy with it. I was bleeding again, except this time it was inside the squircle bounds of an LLM’s shell.
After a few hours of getting it to pronounce the Tamil words and get the inflections right, not to mention my emotional breakdowns in between, it started giving out results that did the ‘screaming’ for me.
After a lot of trial and error with transliterating Tamil words into English, here’s a version of my pain in a waveform!