one of the first albums I ever purchased on cassette was Weird Al Yankovic and Wendy Carlos doing a rendition of Peter and the Wolf.

It certainly wasn't the Weird Al album I was hoping to purchase, but given that I was living in an area kind of distant from decent music vendors, I was grateful to find anything at all. Moreover, I was pleasantly surprised with the outcome anyway!

https://archive.org/details/peter-and-the-wolf-wierd-al

#WendyCarlos #WeirdAlYankovic #PeterAndTheWolf #WeirdAl

Peter and the Wolf - Wierd Al : Wierd Al and Wendy Carlos : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Peter and the Wolf - Wierd Al and Wendy Carlos, CD scan and contents from 1988

^{Internet Archive}

A really nifty deep dive on the current state of #AI #VoiceCloning #music #CoverSongs, via getting the artists #WeirdAlYankovic parodied to ‘cover’ his songs

It mainly shows how distinctive Weird Al’s voice is, though MechaLorde singing ‘Foil’ is pretty good

AI has the potential to disrupt the whole comedy genre of pop-cultural pastiche and parody. Why would you watch comedians doing impressions of celebrities, or riffing on pop-culture texts, when you could just manipulate the celebrity yourself using AI?

Still, what constantly annoys me about the state of AI-driven parody (eg the meme of pop-culture characters as #Balenciaga models) is that the writing underpinning them is so poor

So even if we get to a point where we can completely puppeteer real people’s likenesses and voices, it still fails if there isn’t decent writing

Weird Al’s writing has always been excellent and hilarious. I mean, lines like in ‘Fat’, his parody of ‘Bad’: “When I sit around the house, I really sit around the house”

So far, that kind of stuff can’t be automatically generated – AI-created comedy is of the surreal and absurdist kind that reads as an unintentional, “machine-innocent” artefact of the generation process

https://waxy.org/2023/10/weird-ai-yankovic-voice-cloning/

Weird A.I. Yankovic, a cursed deep dive into the world of voice cloning - Waxy.org

What would it sound like if the musicians parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic sang *his* parodies instead? I jumped off the deep end into the world of A.I. cover songs to find out, and the results are even worse than you imagine.

^{Andy Baio (Waxy.org)}