My friend Tom Witherspoon has been modelling writing to a prompt and having the bravery to post the results. We even talked about it a little bit and the value of sharing those sketches of ideas.
It occurred to me that I do this all the time on my radio show. I’ll drop in a story or two related to a song, or the theme for the night, or whatever. Usually these get a little mental preparation, but a proper written draft would probably make them even better – and why not share those here?
So of course I’m going to cheat on my first one, because this got aired last Friday. But here it is.
It was past sunset and starting to get dark as we exited Fort McAdams. And as we walked towards the ferry, the tall, dark-haired woman walking next to me started to hum the traditional closing song of the Newport Folk Festival, Goodnight, Irene. So I decided I would hum along with her. She smiled.
She asked me what my favorite moment of the weekend was. And I said, “Well, I don’t know if it was the best moment, but my favorite of the moment of the weekend was the set from Illiterate Light,” who I am just entirely in the tank for. I thought they put on a great high energy show and I had a soul-feeding good time.”
She said, “You know, I love Josh and Jake. I love they run the bike stage. I love that they bring us terrific acts who play on the bike stage. But their music… I call it cheese grater music. It’s like taking a cheese grater to my brain.”
And in fairness, it is. The band is two guys, drum and guitar and a whole mess of feedback and processing and an immense amount of personal energy. And I really enjoy it, but I can see why somebody’s first reaction to it, especially live, would be “that’s a whole lot, maybe too much”. I feel like somebody else got that reaction at Newport at least once.
This comment stuck with me for a while. I was driving back when it finally occurred to me. Sometimes you need a cheese grater. You want to make a pizza, a quesadilla, a casserole, a fondue… ok, sure, I guess you can use sliced or cubed or crumbly cheese, but that tool exists for a reason. Sometimes it’s good to rip and tear so you can recombine the shreds, even if there’s a little bit of knuckle-skin in there too.
And sometimes I think you need to take a cheesegrater to your brain. Rip off some of the stuff that’s gotten too tough and see what’s underneath, taste the shreds and see how they recombine. And so this is the rock set, featuring Illiterate Light. Please imagine the opening card for The Last Waltz: this music should be played loud.
Featured image is my own picture of the Claiborne Pell Newport Bridge, taken from Jamestown, RI, on the night of July 27th, 2025.
(I know it’s covered in dust but now I’m wondering if this blog is also covered in chipmunks, squirrels, rabbits and deer.)
The good folks of the Reclaim Hosting Blogging Community of Practice made me feel better about having a neglected blog, and that the difference between having a neglected blog and an un-neglected one is just hitting publish on something so…
I’ve been making bumpers (those little Station Identification messages) for DS106 Radio. This is a fun little audio editing exercise, and a reason to make cheap jokes. And then it occurred to me that I could use oblivion.university to get someone else’s voice involved.
Dr Oblivion Christmas DS106 Radio Bumper
This was the first big experiment with an AI-enabled bumper, in December ’23. The prompt was “Could you make a christmas parody for DS106 radio?” And sure enough, Dr. Oblivion rewrote Jingle Bells in one take. (Note that I didn’t actually specify what to parody!) Then I found a suitable goofy open-licensed copy of Jingle Bells by Mystery Mammal on Free Music Archive, and cut the two together in GarageBand with just a wee little bit of volume adjustment. I picked a copy of the song that was fast enough to almost match Dr Oblivion’s speaking rate; I no longer remember if that was intentional or good luck. I did have to add some breaks to let the music in, but within a line the Doctor doesn’t get too terribly far ahead of the beat.
There were a couple of lessons involved here. Maybe the biggest one is that I’d heard that AI can’t be funny, but I think this is funny enough. I did like it better with some of the lines re-arranged from the original, but I didn’t do any re-prompting, just re-ordering. Dr. Oblivion kind of botched the bridge by putting it at the end; I had to splice it between the verses and honestly only half of it was funny, which is why you only get half a bridge.
DS106 Disclaimer – Dr Oblivion and Dr Jekyll
Bryan Alexander was good enough to tell me about VOID 1680, the solo role-playing game where you create a playlist and the rulebook tells you about the callers to your radio station who might be requesting a song or telling you their story. (It feels very Welcome to Night Vale, at least the way I play it.)
This bumper was for my Valentine’s Day show, which I decided would be VOID 1680’s romantic advice for the paranormally inclined. In the tradition of the great radio and TV doctors of unclear qualification… I bring you Doctor Jekyll.
Also in the tradition of stations that want the attention of a celebrity host but not the legal liability, I figured we needed a disclaimer. I was going to write and record it myself, but then I figured it might sound better to have another voice entirely.
I didn’t screenshot my prompt for this one, though I know I included the part about not being accredited in any “scientific or pseudoscientific” field. (I probably did say accredited; I probably didn’t say “realm”.)
The editing was just finding a suitably spooky track to lay the voice over; “Romantic” by Serge Quadrado fit the bill.
Dr. Oblivion’s Lullaby
This was the week when I just didn’t have any inspiration for a playlist, so I decided to throw an album on. I really enjoy doing whole-album playthroughs; it’s a good reminder that song order isn’t necessarily algorithmically generated and some songs really were intended to be juxtaposed.
My prompt for this one was “Please make a bumper for the Friday Night Tunes show on DS106 Radio. This should be a sarcastic but sympathetic announcement that Joe is too tired or frazzled to do a proper playlist, so tonight’s show is an album playthrough.” Again, the AI plucked the details out of the prompt pretty well. “Sarcastic but sympathetic” seemed to be an emotional target that was easy to hit… it remains to be seen whether that reflects on generative AI or the good folks behind Oblivion University.
Again, the audio was ready to go out of the box, so I just had to pick a nice sleepytime song. Brahms’ Lullaby by Howie Mitchell and Ruth Meyer was just right.
Níl sé in ann Gaeilge a labhairt
I attempted to get Dr. Oblivion to speak in Irish for my St. Patrick’s Day bumper. It attempted to apply English phonetics and failed miserably at producing recognizable Irish, even to my ears only trained on Duolingo. More surprisingly, it complained first about being asked to speak in another language when it has perfectly good English to use. I was ready for the snark but not the ethnocentrism. Presented only as an example of AIs going in unexpected and undesirable ways.
I don’t quite know what, if anything, to make of all this. I think it’s telling that I have little interest in using a generic AI voice. It’s meaningful to me to have Jim Groom’s voiceprint as part of my hobby, even if he didn’t have any relationship to the words coming out of his “mouth”. If I didn’t have some connection to the voice, I’d probably rather figure out how to filter my own into a new “character”.
It’s also fair to say that any of these could have been accomplished with a note to Jim asking him to record something, and (given time and energy) he probably would have done it. Is it cool to use technology to have a parasocial interaction with someone I actually do know? In this case, of course, Jim put the tool out there for use, and he’s liked my Mastodon posts about these bumpers, so yeah, it’s cool. But there’s some point at which this joke would feel old and kind of weird, and it’s not hard to extrapolate out from there.
I’ve been amused by the #15secondshakespeare phenomenon, so I was pretty stoked when it showed up as a daily create. I actually thought I was going to do a different old standard… but then, in honor of making another trip around the sun, I picked this one. Honestly, I’m kind of hoping it’ll go viral. Surprise your friends with it.
The music is “Go From My Window“, a 16th century folk song as arranged by John Dowland and performed by Frank Hiemenz, under a CC-BY license. (It’s really quite pretty when I’m not over-acting over it.) I dumped it into GarageBand and recorded my voice in another track. Lining up my voice at the end of the first phrase was a pretty clear choice; I had to fade the guitar down (further than I thought I’d need to) and adjust the spoken volume up a bit.
Daily Create 1180 asked us to create a soundmap of our town. Instead of following the prompt as written, I picked one moment in my day – walking home in the early afternoon from a Krudas Cubensi concert at Kenyon College.
It was early April – the trees were starting to bud, and you can hear a light spring breeze blowing through the microphone at places. The birds have returned, and you can hear them chattering at each other. But it’s too early for the hum of lawnmowers, not warm enough yet for the drone of air conditioners. Gambier is a rural town; I think in the 6 minute walk you’ll hear 3 cars go by.
You’ll also hear my feet. Boy, will you hear my feet. I really thought I was holding my iPhone high enough to not get so much of that noise, but apparently not. So, there’s an excuse to learn something new – I opened up the graphic equalizer in GarageBand, turned on the analyzer so I could see where the frequencies of my footfalls lay, and turned those ranges down. They’re still prominent – it is a walk, after all – but I don’t think they’re as dominant as they were in the original.
This is my walk to work. I’ve probably taken it more than 4,000 times. But I usually take it with my headphones on and music or a podcast going, so I miss these sounds – which means I miss the chance to contemplate the seasons and the neighborhood. I appreciate TDC reminding me that there is value in taking a walk just to listen.
I agreed to give a mini-workshop on podcasting on Wednesday, to force myself to learn more about Audacity. Creating a bumper for DS106 Radio seemed like a good way to get started, and it’s a manageable amount of work for a 20-minute demonstration.
Here’s the thing, followed by how I made it:
First, I wanted to know what I’d be saying. The old Outer Limits opening came to mind – “we control the horizontal, we control the vertical.” That speaks a little to the “own your tools” ethos of DS106.
But if “we” control it, that suggests that “you” (the listener) doesn’t. And that doesn’t sound very DS106 at all. So I rewrote it, for a participatory audio culture, to be “Radio DS106 – You control the gain; you control the Auto-Tune.”
Then I went hunting for an audio track to mix in. A search for “sci-fi” on CCMixter turned up a track called “Space Station Melody” by a member called Gurdonark. (For a 15-second bump on a non-profit radio station, you could probably make a fair use argument for whatever you wanted to sample… but it’s also a chance for me to model searching for Creative Commons-licensed material for my faculty.)
It’s kind of funny, come to think of it… the futuristic pinging of Space Station Melody is more reminiscent of the pizzicato opening of The Twilight Zone than the dramatic strings and horns of The Outer Limits.
Anyway, I recorded into Audacity, imported the Space Station Melody MP3, and arranged the voice track to the point in the music where I wanted it to start. I brought the volume of the music down a hair while I was talking with the Envelope tool, and used the Fade Out filter to get out. (And then trimmed off the end of the music.)
I owe a link of thanks to Nicky Memita for her post on this assignment, which was quite useful as I navigated Audacity’s imposing list of filters and effects.
