RNA the Musical

Tyhry and Marda in the Casanay RNA laboratory.

  Having completed the 48,000 word-long science fiction story "The RNA Seeds", I used Google's Flow Music to turn "The RNA Seeds" into a musical. That musical version of the story (titled "RNA the Musical") ended up including 26 songs, each about 3 minutes in duration.

 Google's Flow Music has a feature called "Spaces" which I used to make an alien voice synthesizer and a tool for displaying illustrated liner notes for each song. These were my first two experiments in vibe coding. The user interface for the liner notes display tool is shown below in Figure 1...

Figure 1. The liner notes Space for "RNA the Musical". Created by vibe coding.

Figure 3. Flow Music tabs.

 I ran into several problems while experimenting with Google's Flow Music. I've still never paid for any AI service, so everything described on this blog page pertains to the free version of Google's Flow Music. I started with Google's Flow Music by using an older version of the Firefox browser and I created an account with the user name "Tyhry". Quite quickly, I created a second account with user name "Eddy Watson" which I use with Google's Chrome browser. However, there seem to be bugs in Google's Flow Music (see below in Figure 2) that are so severe as to occasionally crash even my newer computer when running Chrome.

Figure 2. A Flow Music error message.

 

Figure 4. User preferences.

The main set of tabs in the Flow Music user interface is shown to the right in Figure 3. The tab that is labeled "Tyhry FREE" opens up another set of tabs that are essentially user preferences and user-specific information such as "credits" (see Figure 4, to the left). A new Flow Music account starts with 500 credits. I get a deduction of credits when I use Flow Music's AI to generate songs, but each day I get some "daily free credits".

Clicking on the "Profile" tab that is shown in Figure 3, opens a profile page like the one shown below in Figure 5. Flow Music makes it fairly effortless to add images. You can either enter a text prompt and get an AI-generated image or you can upload images the are 5 MB and smaller. Shown in Figure 5, below, is a banner image for the "Tyhry" account that was made using Google's text-to-image Flow software. In many of my science fiction stories, I like to imagine that Tyhry is a human variant, a tryp'At.

Figure 5. Flow Music user profile page for user "Tyhry".

Figure 6. Account settings.

One of the Google Flow Music features is seen above in Figure 5. As long as you are using Google's Flow Music, at the bottom of your browser page is a song player.

Image for "Load Bearing".

In a user's account settings (see Figure 6, to the right), one of the options is to force "clean lyrics only". Apparently, when active, this preference setting ensures that all song lyrics Flow Music generates will be PG and not include "dirty" words. In my own songs, I have not explored how "dirty" Flow Music can get. When I searched for "dirty" I found "Low-Down Dirty". My search for "sexy" turned up "Sexy Temptress". The only song that Flow Music generated for me which seems at all "racy" is "Load Bearing". 

Some of the
lyrics for
"Load Bearing"

The song "Load Bearing" was generated spontaneously by Flow Music while it was making up "alien voices" for several of the characters in "The RNA Seeds" (see this session). "Load Bearing" is a song for Klaudy the robot, who is a character in "The RNA Seeds". During that vibe coding session, the Flow Music "Producer" AI had just worked on a voice for Systolina when it then suggested, "Klaudy the Manikoid robot might be an interesting contrast with those "industrial mechanical textures." I clicked on one of the AI-generated "suggested replies" which was "Refine Klaudy's voice". Google's Flow Music then generated the lyrics for the song "Load Bearing".

"Learn More"

Google's Flow Music has an annoying "system" of credits, points, levels and badges. Users begin in the "learning" level and can progress to a "debut" level after "earning" 1000 points. The tab/page titled "Customize Producer" (see below, Figure 7) can be reached by clicking on the tab in the main interface (Figure 3) that displays your current number of points.

Figure 7. The "Customize Producer"page/tab.

One of my Google's Flow Music playlists (titled "Meta Music" is for songs about the "joys" of using Flow Music and other AI software. Google's Flow Music automatically remembers things about users. What the AI has learned about you can be viewed by clicking the "Memories" tab that is on the "Customize Producer" page (Figure 7). One of the things that Flow Music has learned about me is: "user often creates songs satirizing their experience with Producer and the platform's limitations"

There is a blog for Flow Music which seems to have only one entry from March 2025. I suppose Google has a rule that all of its "apps" need to have a blog, so ✅.

 

dsa

UNDER CONSTRUCTION

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