#you only need two voice actors and some royalty free music

[elvesofnoldor]

honestly it truly is fucking nearly impossible to adapt interview with the vampire (1976) into any sort of visual medium that is 1. honest to the source material and 2. not triggering as fuck to watch. The only adaptation of IWTV that i will accept is a MAG style found footage audio drama of the entire book told as the conversation between Louis and Daniel. It'd be presented as the cassette tapes that the conversation was committed to, so it'd have the cassette tape audio effect the way that MAG episodes had. It'd also have the sort of eerie non-diegetic ambient mood music that MAG has, and the soundtrack would played over passages that's most revealing of Louis' true character. Different than the book, Daniel would interrupt Louis when Louis describes Claudia in very gross and p*do language, asking him to clarify, so that audience is more directly called to ask to question what kind of person Louis really is. And instead of ending in Daniel asking to be made into a vampire, this audio drama would end in Daniel questioning the narrative that Louis presented and Louis' intent for inviting him home after spotting him at the bar, angering Louis and prompting Louis to attack him. The cassette tapes would abruptly end with the attack. The End.

[paths-of-my-childhood-candid]

Lover Conquers All

By: Mark Sutherland for Music Week Date: November 4th 2019 issue (published online on December 13th 2019)

She’s the world’s biggest pop star, but despite her global success, Taylor Swift is also the music industry’s greatest advocate for artists’ and songwriters’ rights. And, with a ground-breaking new record deal and a bold new album, Lover, she’s not about to stop now. Music Week meets her to talk music and business...

Around this time of year, the Taylor Swift anniversaries come at you thick and fast. Nine years since her third album, Speak Now, every note of which was written entirely by Swift, hit the shelves. Five years since she released her mould-breaking pop album, 1989, and went from the world’s biggest country star to the world’s biggest pop star overnight. Two years since her Reputation record saw her become the only musician to post four successive million-plus debut sales weeks in the United States. And so on.

But today, Swift’s mind is drawn further back, to the 13th anniversary of her debut, self-titled record, and the days when her album releases weren’t automatically accompanied by mountains of hype and enough think-pieces to sink a battleship. Her journal entries from the time - helpfully reprinted as part of the deluxe editions of her new album, Lover - reveal her as an excited, optimistic teenager, but also one with a grasp of marketing strategies and label politics way beyond her years, even if she was reluctant to actually take credit for her ideas.

“It always was and it always will be an interesting dance being a young woman in the music industry,” she smiles ruefully. “We don’t have a lot of female executives, we’re working on getting more female engineers and producers but, while we are such a drastic gender minority, it’s interesting to try and figure out how to be.”

And, of course, when Swift started out she was, as she points out, “an actual kid”.

“I was planning the release of my first album when I was 15 years old,” she reminisces. “And I was a fully gangly 15, I reminded everyone of their niece! I was in this industry in Nashville and country music, where I was making album marketing calls, but I never wanted to stand up and say, ‘Yeah, that promotions plan you just complimented my label on, I thought of that! Me and my Mom thought of that!’

“When you’re a new artist you wonder how much space you can take up and, as a woman, you wonder how much space you can take up pretty much your whole period of growing up,” she continues. “For me, growing up and knowing that I was an adult was realising that I was allowed to take up space from a marketing perspective, from a business perspective, from an opinionated perspective. And that feels a lot better than constantly trying to wonder if I’m allowed to be here.”

In the intervening years, Taylor Swift has released six further, brilliant albums, growing from country starlet to all-conquering pop behemoth along the way. She takes up “more space”, as she would put it, than any other musician on the planet: a sales and now - having belatedly embraced the format with Lover - streaming phenomenon; a powerhouse stadium performer; an award-garlanded songwriter for herself and others; and a social media giant with a combined 278 million followers across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook (which would make the Taylor Nation the fourth most populous one on earth, after China, India and the US).

But her influence on music and the music industry doesn’t end there. Because, over the years, Swift has also become a leading advocate for artists’ and songwriters’ rights, in a digital landscape that doesn’t always have such matters as a priority.

In 2015, she stood up to Apple Music over its plans to not pay artist royalties during subscribers’ three-month free trials (Apple backed down immediately). She pulled her entire catalogue from Spotify in 2014 in protest that its free tier was devaluing music, sending Daniel Ek scrambling to justify his business model. When she returned in 2017, it was a crucial fillip for the streaming service’s IPO plans.

More recently, her ground-breaking new record deal with Republic Records contained clauses not only guaranteeing her ownership of her future masters, but also ensuring Universal Music will share the spoils of its Spotify shares with its artists, without any payments counting against unrecouped balances. And when her long-time former label boss Scott Borchetta sold Big Machine to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, taking Swift’s first six albums with him, the star publicly called out what she saw as her “worst-case scenario” and stressed: “You deserve to own the art you make”. She may yet re-record her old songs in protest.

In short, Swift has, for a long time now, been unafraid to use her voice on industry matters, whether they pertain to her own stellar career or the thousands of other artists out there struggling to make a living.

All of which makes Swift not just the greatest star of our age, but perhaps the most important to the future development of the industry as a more artist-centric, songwriter-friendly business. Hers is still the life of the pop phenomenon - she spent today in Los Angeles doing promotion and photoshoots (or, in her words, “having people put make-up on me”) as Lover continues to build on huge critical acclaim and even huger initial sales. But now, she’s kicking back with her cats - one of whom seems determined to disrupt Music Week’s interview by “stampeding” through at every opportunity - and ready to talk business.

And for Swift, business is good. The impact of her joining streaming, and the decline of traditional album sales, may have prevented her from posting a fifth successive one million-plus sales debut, but Lover still sold more US copies (867,000) in its first week than any record since her own Reputation. It’s sold 117,513 copies to date in the UK, according to the Official Charts Company.

Even better, while Reputation - a record forged in the white heat of a social media snakestorm over her on-going feud with Kanye West - was plenty of show and rather less grow, Lover continues to reveal hidden depths. Reputation struck a sometimes curious contrast between the unrepentant warrior Swift she was showing to the outside world and the love story with British actor Joe Aiwyn that was quietly developing behind closed doors, but Lover is the sort of versatile, cohesive album that the streaming age was supposed to kill off.

It contains more than its fair share of pop bangers (You Need To Calm Down, Me!), but also some gorgeously-crafted acoustic tracks (Lover, Cornelia Street), some pithy political commentary (The Man, Miss America & The Heartbreak Prince) and the sort of musical diversions (Paper Rings’ irresistible rockabilly stomp, the childlike oddity of It’s Nice To Have A Friend) that no other pop superstar would have the sheer musical chops to attempt, let alone pull off.

“Taylor’s creative instincts as an artist and songwriter are brilliant,” says Monte Lipman, founder and CEO of Swift’s US label, Republic. “Our partnership represents a strategic alliance built on mutual respect, trust, and complete transparency. Her vision is extraordinary as she sets the tone for every campaign and initiative.”

No wonder David Joseph, chairman/CEO of her long-time UK label Virgin EMI’s parent company Universal Music UK, is thrilled with how things are going.

“Love Story was a fitting first single release for Taylor here - she’s loved the UK from day one and has engaged so much with her fans and teams,” says Joseph. “She really respects and values what’s going on here creatively. To see her go from playing the Students’ Union at King’s College to Wembley Stadium has been extraordinary. Taylor is an artist constantly striving for perfection, and with Lover - from my personal point of view, her most accomplished work to date adore working with her and whilst it’s been more than 10 years this still feels like the start.”

And today, Swift is keen to concentrate on the present and future. She has a starring role in Cats coming up (and a new song on the soundtrack, Beautiful Ghosts, co-written with Andrew Lloyd Webber) and, after a spectacularly intimate Paris launch show in September, festival dates and her own LoverFest to plan (UK shows will be revealed soon). Time, then, to tell the cats to calm down and sit down with Music Week to talk streaming, contracts and why she’s “obsessed” with the music industry...

Unlike with Reputation, most of the discussion around Lover seems to have been focused on the music... Absolutely! One of the ideas I had about this record, and something I’ve implemented into my life in the last couple of years is that I don’t like distractions. And, for a while, it felt like my life had to come with distractions from the music, whether it was tabloid fascination with my personal life or my friendships or what I was wearing. I realised in the last couple of years that, if I don’t give a window into distraction, people can’t try to look in and see something other than the music. I love that, if you really pour yourself into the idea that an album is still important and try really hard to make something that is worth people’s attention span, time and energy, that can still come across. Because we are living in an industry right now where everyone’s rushing towards taking us into a singles industry and, in some cases, it has become that. But there are still some cases where clearly the album is important to people.

Does it matter that some new artists won’t get to make albums the way you always have? It’s interesting. Five years ago I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and said, maybe in the next five years, we would see artists releasing music the way that they want to. I thought that each artist would start to curate what is important to them, not just from an artistic standpoint but from a marketing standpoint. It’s really interesting to see different release plans, if you look at what Drake did and then what Beyoncé does, incredible artists who have really curated what it is to drop music in their own way. We all do it differently, which is cool. As long as people dropping just singles want to be doing that, then I’m fine with it, but if it feels like a big general wave that’s being pressured by people in power, their teams or their labels, that’s not cool. But I do really hope that in the future artists have more of a say over strategy. We’re not just supposed to make art and then hand it to a team that masterminds it.

Were you worried about putting an album on streaming on release day for the first time? Well, there are ways that streaming services could really promote the [whole] album in a more incentivised way. We could have album charts on streaming. The industry follows where they can get prizes. So you have a singles chart on streaming services which is great but, if you split things up into genre charts for example, that would really incentivise people. It’s important that we keep trying to strive to make the experience better for users but also make it more interesting for artists to keep wanting to achieve. But I really did love the experience of putting the album on streaming. I loved the immediacy, I loved that people who maybe weren’t a huge diehard fan were curious and saying, ‘I wonder what this is like’ and listening to it and deciding that they liked it.

You’d resisted streaming for a long time. Have you changed your mind about the format now? I always knew that I would enjoy the aspects of streaming that make [your music] so immediately available to so many people. That’s the part of it that I unequivocally always felt really sad I was missing out on. There wasn’t ever a day when I woke up and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m really glad that multitudes of people don’t have access to my music!’ So I always knew that streaming was an incredible mechanism and model for the future but I still don’t think we have the royalties and compensation system worked out. That’s between the labels and their artists and I realised that me, to use a gross word, ‘leveraging’ what I can bring to cut a better deal for the artists at my record label was really important for me.

How big a factor were things like that in you signing to Republic/Universal? That’s important to me because that means they’re adopting some of my ideas. If they take me on as an artist that means they really thought it through. Because with me, come opinions about how we can better our industry. I’m one of the only people in the artist realm who can be loud about it. People who are on their fifth, sixth or seventh album, we’re the only ones who can speak out, because new artists and producers and writers need to work. They need to be endearing and likeable and available to their labels and streaming services at all times. It’s up to the artists who have been around for a second to say, ‘Hey guys, the producers and the writers and the artists are the ones who are making music what it is’. And we’re in a great place in music right now thanks to them. They should be going to their mailbox and feeling like they’ve got a pension plan, rather than feeling like, ‘Oh yay, I can pay half my rent this month after this No.1 song’.

Did you have more creative freedom making Lover than on your previous albums? In my previous situation, there were creative constraints, issues that we had over the years. I’ve always given 100% to projects, I always over-delivered, thinking that that generosity would be returned to me. But I ended up finding that generosity in a new situation with a new label that understands that I deserve to own what I make. That meant so much to me because it was given over to me so freely. When someone just looks at you and says ‘Yes, you deserve what you want’, after a decade or more of being told, ‘I’m not sure you deserve what you want’ - there’s a freedom that comes with that. It’s like when people find ‘the one’ they’re like, ‘It was easy, I just knew and I felt free’. All of a sudden you’re being told you’re worth exactly, no, more than what you thought you were worth. And that made me feel I could make an album that was exactly what I wanted to make. There’s an eclectic side to Lover, a confessional side, it varies from acoustic to really poppy pop, but that’s what I like to do. And, while you would never make something artistic based on something so unromantic as a contract, it was more than that. It was a group of people saying, ‘We believe in what you’re making, go make what you want to make and you deserve to own it too’.

You’re obviously not happy about what’s happened at Big Machine since you left. But will the attention mean artists don’t find themselves in this situation in the future? I hope so. That’s the only reason that I speak out about things. The fans don’t understand these things, the public isn’t being made aware. This generation has so much information available to them so I thought it was important that the fans knew what I was going through, because I knew it was going to affect every aspect of my life and I wanted them to be the first to know. And in and amongst that group, I know there are people that want to make music some day. It involves every new artist that is reading that and going, ‘Wait, that’s what I’m signing?’ They don’t have to sign stuff that’s unfair to them. If you don’t ask the right questions and you sit in front of the wrong desk in front of the wrong person, they can take everything from you.

Songwriters are in dispute with Spotify in the US over its decision to appeal the Copyright Board decision to boost songwriting royalties. Do writers need more respect? Absolutely. In terms of the power structure, the songwriters, the producers, the engineers, the people who are breathing magic into our industry, need to be listened to. They’re not being greedy. This is legitimately an industry where people are having trouble paying their bills and they’re the most talented people we have. This isn’t them sitting in their mansions going, ‘I wish this mansion was bigger and I would like a yacht please’. This is actually people who are going to work every single day. I got into writing when I was in Nashville and it was very much like what I read about the Brill Building. You would write every day, whether you were inspired or not, and in the process I met artists and writers. Somebody would walk in and someone would say, ‘Oh, he’s still getting mailbox money from that Faith Hill cut a couple of years ago, he’s set’. That’s not a thing anymore. Mailbox money is a thing of the past and we need to remember that these are the people that create the heartbeat that we’re all dancing to or crying to.

You were clearly aware of music industry machinations from a young age... Reading back on the journal entries, I forgot how obsessed I was with the industry as a teenager. I was so fascinated by how it works and how it was changing. Every part of it was interesting to me. I had drawn the stages for most of my tours a year before I went on them. That really was fun for me as a teenager! A lot of people who start out very young in music, either don’t have a say or don’t have the will to do the business side of it, but weirdly that was so much fun for me to try and learn. I had a lot of energy when I was 16!

Are you doing similar drawings for next year’s LoverFest? Definitely. And that’s why it’s still fun for me to take on a challenge like, ‘Oh, let’s just plan our own festival’. Let’s create a bill of artists and try and make it as fun as possible for the fans. I’m so intrigued by what that’s going to be like.

Finally, when we last did an interview in 2015, you said in five years’ time you wanted to be “finding complexity in happiness”. How has that worked out? That’s exactly what’s happened with this album! I think a lot of writers have the fear of stability, emotional health and happiness. Our whole careers, people make jokes about how, ‘Just wait until you meet someone nice, you’ll run out of stuff to write about’. I was talking to [Cats director] Tom Hooper about this because he said one thing his mother taught him was, ‘Don’t ever let people tell you that you can’t make art if you’re happy’. I thought that was so amazing. He’s a creator in a completely different medium but he has been subjected to that same joke over and over again that we must be miserable to create. Lover is important to me in so many ways, but it’s so imperative for me as a human being that songwriting is not tied to my own personal misery. It’s good to know that, it really is!

[bananaofswifts]

Around this time of year, the Taylor Swift anniversaries come at you thick and fast.

Nine years since her third album, Speak Now, every note of which was written entirely by Swift, hit the shelves. Five years since she released her mould-breaking pop album, 1989, and went from the world’s biggest country star to the world’s biggest pop star overnight. Two years since her Reputation record saw her become the only musician to post four successive million-plus debut sales weeks in the United States. And so on.

But today, Swift’s mind is drawn further back, to the 13th anniversary of her debut, self-titled record, and the days when her album releases weren’t automatically accompanied by mountains of hype and enough think-pieces to sink a battleship. Her journal entries from the time – helpfully reprinted as part of the deluxe editions of her new album, Lover – reveal her as an excited, optimistic teenager, but also one with a grasp of marketing strategies and label politics way beyond her years, even if she was reluctant to actually take credit for her ideas.

“It always was and it always will be an interesting dance being a young woman in the music industry,” she smiles ruefully. “We don’t have a lot of female executives, we’re working on getting more female engineers and producers but, while we are such a drastic gender minority, it’s interesting to try and figure out how to be.”

And, of course, when Swift started out she was, as she points out, “an actual kid”.

“I was planning the release of my first album when I was 15 years old,” she reminisces. “And I was a fully gangly 15, I reminded everyone of their niece! I was in this industry in Nashville and country music, where I was making album marketing calls, but I never wanted to stand up and say, ‘Yeah, that promotions plan you just complimented my label on, I thought of that! Me and my Mom thought of that!’

“When you’re a new artist you wonder how much space you can take up and, as a woman, you wonder how much space you can take up pretty much your whole period of growing up,” she continues. “For me, growing up and knowing that I was an adult was realising that I was allowed to take up space from a marketing perspective, from a business perspective, from an opinionated perspective. And that feels a lot better than constantly trying to wonder if I’m allowed to be here.”

In the intervening years, Taylor Swift has released six further, brilliant albums, growing from country starlet to all-conquering pop behemoth along the way. She takes up “more space”, as she would put it, than any other musician on the planet: a sales and now – having belatedly embraced the format with Lover – streaming phenomenon; a powerhouse stadium performer; an award-garlanded songwriter for herself and others; and a social media giant with a combined 278 million followers across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook (which would make the Taylor Nation the fourth most populous one on earth, after China, India and the US).

But her influence on music and the music industry doesn’t end there. Because, over the years, Swift has also become a leading advocate for artists’ and songwriters’ rights, in a digital landscape that doesn’t always have such matters as a priority.

In 2015, she stood up to Apple Music over its plans to not pay artist royalties during subscribers’ three-month free trials (Apple backed down immediately). She pulled her entire catalogue from Spotify in 2014 in protest that its free tier was devaluing music, sending Daniel Ek scrambling to justify his business model. When she returned in 2017, it was a crucial fillip for the streaming service’s IPO plans.

More recently, her ground-breaking new record deal with Republic Records contained clauses not only guaranteeing her ownership of her future masters, but also ensuring Universal Music will share the spoils of its Spotify shares with its artists, without any payments counting against unrecouped balances. And when her long-time former label boss Scott Borchetta sold Big Machine to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, taking Swift’s first six albums with him, the star publicly called out what she saw as her “worst-case scenario” and stressed: “You deserve to own the art you make”. She may yet re-record her old songs in protest.

In short, Swift has, for a long time now, been unafraid to use her voice on industry matters, whether they pertain to her own stellar career or the thousands of other artists out there struggling to make a living.

All of which makes Swift not just the greatest star of our age, but perhaps the most important to the future development of the industry as a more artist-centric, songwriter-friendly business. Hers is still the life of the pop phenomenon – she spent today in Los Angeles doing promotion and photoshoots (or, in her words, “having people put make-up on me”) as Lover continues to build on huge critical acclaim and even huger initial sales. But now, she’s kicking back with her cats – one of whom seems determined to disrupt Music Week’s interview by “stampeding” through at every opportunity – and ready to talk business.

And for Swift, business is good. The impact of her joining streaming, and the decline of traditional album sales, may have prevented her from posting a fifth successive one million-plus sales debut, but Lover still sold more US copies (867,000) in its first week than any record since her own Reputation. It’s sold 117,513 copies to date in the UK, according to the Official Charts Company.

Even better, while Reputation – a record forged in the white heat of a social media snakestorm over her on-going feud with Kanye West – was plenty of show and rather less grow, Lover continues to reveal hidden depths. Reputation struck a sometimes curious contrast between the unrepentant warrior Swift she was showing to the outside world and the love story with British actor Joe Alwyn that was quietly developing behind closed doors, but Lover is the sort of versatile, cohesive album that the streaming age was supposed to kill off.

It contains more than its fair share of pop bangers (You Need To Calm Down, Me!), but also some gorgeously-crafted acoustic tracks (Lover, Cornelia Street), some pithy political commentary (The Man, Miss America & The Heartbreak Prince) and the sort of musical diversions (Paper Rings’ irresistible rockabilly stomp, the childlike oddity of It’s Nice To Have A Friend) that no other pop superstar would have the sheer musical chops to attempt, let alone pull off.

“Taylor’s creative instincts as an artist and songwriter are brilliant,” says Monte Lipman, founder and CEO of Swift’s US label, Republic. “Our partnership represents a strategic alliance built on mutual respect, trust, and complete transparency. Her vision is extraordinary as she sets the tone for every campaign and initiative.”

No wonder David Joseph, chairman/CEO of her long-time UK label Virgin EMI’s parent company Universal Music UK, is thrilled with how things are going.

“Love Story was a fitting first single release for Taylor here – she’s loved the UK from day one and has engaged so much with her fans and teams,” says Joseph. “She really respects and values what’s going on here creatively. To see her go from playing the Students’ Union at King’s College to Wembley Stadium has been extraordinary. Taylor is an artist constantly striving for perfection, and with Lover – from my personal point of view, her most accomplished work to date – her songwriting has gone to a new level. I adore working with her and whilst it’s been more than 10 years this still feels like the start.”

And today, Swift is keen to concentrate on the present and future. She has a starring role in Cats coming up (and a new song on the soundtrack, Beautiful Ghosts, co-written with Andrew Lloyd Webber) and, after a spectacularly intimate Paris launch show in September, festival dates and her own LoverFest to plan (UK shows will be revealed soon). Time, then, to tell the cats to calm down and sit down with Music Week to talk streaming, contracts and why she’s “obsessed” with the music industry…

Unlike with Reputation, most of the discussion around Lover seems to have been focused on the music…

“Absolutely! One of the ideas I had about this record, and something I’ve implemented into my life in the last couple of years is that I don’t like distractions. And, for a while, it felt like my life had to come with distractions from the music, whether it was tabloid fascination with my personal life or my friendships or what I was wearing. I realised in the last couple of years that, if I don’t give a window into distraction, people can’t try to look in and see something other than the music. I love that, if you really pour yourself into the idea that an album is still important and try really hard to make something that is worth people’s attention span, time and energy, that can still come across. Because we are living in an industry right now where everyone’s rushing towards taking us into a singles industry and, in some cases, it has become that. But there are still some cases where clearly the album is important to people.”

Does it matter that some new artists won’t get to make albums the way you always have?

“It’s interesting. Five years ago I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and said, maybe in the next five years, we would see artists releasing music the way that they want to. I thought that each artist would start to curate what is important to them, not just from an artistic standpoint but from a marketing standpoint. It’s really interesting to see different release plans, if you look at what Drake did and then what Beyoncé does, incredible artists who have really curated what it is to drop music in their own way. We all do it differently, which is cool. As long as people dropping just singles want to be doing that, then I’m fine with it, but if it feels like a big general wave that’s being pressured by people in power, their teams or their labels, that’s not cool. But I do really hope that in the future artists have more of a say over strategy. We’re not just supposed to make art and then hand it to a team that masterminds it.”

Were you worried about putting an album on streaming on release day for the first time?

“Well, there are ways that streaming services could really promote the [whole] album in a more incentivised way. We could have album charts on streaming. The industry follows where they can get prizes. So you have a singles chart on streaming services which is great but, if you split things up into genre charts for example, that would really incentivise people. It’s important that we keep trying to strive to make the experience better for users but also make it more interesting for artists to keep wanting to achieve. But I really did love the experience of putting the album on streaming. I loved the immediacy, I loved that people who maybe weren’t a huge diehard fan were curious and saying, ‘I wonder what this is like’ and listening to it and deciding that they liked it.”

You’d resisted streaming for a long time. Have you changed your mind about the format now?

“I always knew that I would enjoy the aspects of streaming that make [your music] so immediately available to so many people. That’s the part of it that I unequivocally always felt really sad I was missing out on. There wasn’t ever a day when I woke up and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m really glad that multitudes of people don’t have access to my music!’ So I always knew that streaming was an incredible mechanism and model for the future but I still don’t think we have the royalties and compensation system worked out. That’s between the labels and their artists and I realised that me, to use a gross word, ‘leveraging’ what I can bring to cut a better deal for the artists at my record label was really important for me.”

How big a factor were things like that in you signing to Republic/Universal?

“That’s important to me because that means they’re adopting some of my ideas. If they take me on as an artist that means they really thought it through. Because with me, come opinions about how we can better our industry. I’m one of the only people in the artist realm who can be loud about it. People who are on their fifth, sixth or seventh album, we’re the only ones who can speak out, because new artists and producers and writers need to work. They need to be endearing and likeable and available to their labels and streaming services at all times. It’s up to the artists who have been around for a second to say, ‘Hey guys, the producers and the writers and the artists are the ones who are making music what it is’. And we’re in a great place in music right now thanks to them. They should be going to their mailbox and feeling like they’ve got a pension plan, rather than feeling like, ‘Oh yay, I can pay half my rent this month after this No.1 song’.”

Did you have more creative freedom making Lover than on your previous albums?

“In my previous situation, there were creative constraints, issues that we had over the years. I’ve always given 100% to projects, I always over-delivered, thinking that that generosity would be returned to me. But I ended up finding that generosity in a new situation with a new label that understands that I deserve to own what I make. That meant so much to me because it was given over to me so freely. When someone just looks at you and says ‘Yes, you deserve what you want’, after a decade or more of being told, ‘I’m not sure you deserve what you want’ – there’s a freedom that comes with that. It’s like when people find ‘the one’ they’re like, ‘It was easy, I just knew and I felt free’. All of a sudden you’re being told you’re worth exactly, no, more than what you thought you were worth. And that made me feel I could make an album that was exactly what I wanted to make. There’s an eclectic side to Lover, a confessional side, it varies from acoustic to really poppy pop, but that’s what I like to do. And, while you would never make something artistic based on something so unromantic as a contract, it was more than that. It was a group of people saying, ‘We believe in what you’re making, go make what you want to make and you deserve to own it too’.”

You’re obviously not happy about what’s happened at Big Machine since you left. But will the attention mean artists don’t find themselves in this situation in the future?

“I hope so. That’s the only reason that I speak out about things. The fans don’t understand these things, the public isn’t being made aware. This generation has so much information available to them so I thought it was important that the fans knew what I was going through, because I knew it was going to affect every aspect of my life and I wanted them to be the first to know. And in and amongst that group, I know there are people that want to make music some day. It involves every new artist that is reading that and going, ‘Wait, that’s what I’m signing?’ They don’t have to sign stuff that’s unfair to them. If you don’t ask the right questions and you sit in front of the wrong desk in front of the wrong person, they can take everything from you.”

Songwriters are in dispute with Spotify in the US over its decision to appeal the Copyright Board decision to boost songwriting royalties. Do writers need more respect?

“Absolutely. In terms of the power structure, the songwriters, the producers, the engineers, the people who are breathing magic into our industry, need to be listened to. They’re not being greedy. This is legitimately an industry where people are having trouble paying their bills and they’re the most talented people we have. This isn’t them sitting in their mansions going, ‘I wish this mansion was bigger and I would like a yacht please’. This is actually people who are going to work every single day. I got into writing when I was in Nashville and it was very much like what I read about the Brill Building. You would write every day, whether you were inspired or not, and in the process I met artists and writers. Somebody would walk in and someone would say, ‘Oh, he’s still getting mailbox money from that Faith Hill cut a couple of years ago, he’s set’. That’s not a thing anymore. Mailbox money is a thing of the past and we need to remember that these are the people that create the heartbeat that we’re all dancing to or crying to.”

You were clearly aware of music industry machinations from a young age…

“Reading back on the journal entries, I forgot how obsessed I was with the industry as a teenager. I was so fascinated by how it works and how it was changing. Every part of it was interesting to me. I had drawn the stages for most of my tours a year before I went on them. That really was fun for me as a teenager! A lot of people who start out very young in music, either don’t have a say or don’t have the will to do the business side of it, but weirdly that was so much fun for me to try and learn. I had a lot of energy when I was 16!”

Are you doing similar drawings for next year’s LoverFest?

“Definitely. And that’s why it’s still fun for me to take on a challenge like, ‘Oh, let’s just plan our own festival’. Let’s create a bill of artists and try and make it as fun as possible for the fans. I’m so intrigued by what that’s going to be like.”

Finally, when we last did an interview in 2015, you said in five years’ time you wanted to be “finding complexity in happiness”. How has that worked out?

“That’s exactly what’s happened with this album! I think a lot of writers have the fear of stability, emotional health and happiness. Our whole careers, people make jokes about how, ‘Just wait until you meet someone nice, you’ll run out of stuff to write about’. I was talking to [Cats director] Tom Hooper about this because he said one thing his mother taught him was, ‘Don’t ever let people tell you that you can’t make art if you’re happy’. I thought that was so amazing. He’s a creator in a completely different medium but he has been subjected to that same joke over and over again that we must be miserable to create. Lover is important to me in so many ways, but it’s so imperative for me as a human being that songwriting is not tied to my own personal misery. It’s good to know that, it really is!”

[bigthighsandstupidguys]

Thank you to the lovely gems @satans-helper @mountainofthesunn @beautifulcinephile @safarimama @gretavanfic for tagging me! <3

1. What is your middle name?

Raquel

2. How old are you?

27, yes I’m ancient in Tumblr years haha

3. When is your birthday?

Feb. 23

4. What is your zodiac sign?

Pisces sun, Aries rising, Scorpio moon.

5. What is your favourite colour?

dark greenish blue, like dark teal I guess.

6. What’s your lucky number?

13

7. Do you have any pets?

My kitty cat Padmé....and there’s Obi, too, a younger, misbehaving kitty cat.

8. Where are you from?

Southern Arizona (it’s a dry heat!)

9. How tall are you?

5′1 1⁄4 “(you will pry that fourth of an inch from my cold, dead, hobbit sized hands!) also all y’all are tall af! What gives?

10. What shoe size are you?

7 or 7.5 depends on the style of shoe

11. How many pairs of shoes do you own?

A reasonable amount, I do believe in having shoes for every occasion.

12. What was your last dream about?

I was trying to pair a body suit with a skirt or something to attend a concert, but then a “race of superior humans” took over everything and well, the concert was no longer a priority.

13. What talents do you have?

I like to think I’m a pretty good dancer...

14. Are you psychic in any way?

I have a strong intuition, I think. 

15. Favourite song?

Today I am going to say Free Fallin’ by Tom Petty.

16. Favourite movie?

Probably Forrest Gump

17. Who would be your ideal partner?

Someone kind and funny. A good human being who’s just trying their best.

18. Do you want children?

I think so, but not for a long, long time.

19. Do you want a church wedding?

I got opinions about marriage as an institution...but if I gotta get married I think I’d want it to be somewhere outside.

20. Are you religious?

Not anymore

21. Have you ever been to the hospital?

Not admitted, just emergency room stuff

22. Have you ever got in trouble with the law?

lol no

23. Have you ever met any celebrities?

I met an actor from a kid’s soap opera in Mexico once idk his name tho. (and i swear to god I saw Travis Barker from Blink 182 at the San Diego Zoo once, could not confirm tho)

24. Baths or showers?

Showers (but Lush bath bombs are fun and fizzly and smell good)

25. What color socks are you wearing?

barefoot rn

26. Have you ever been famous?

no, but as a toddler my picture was used in a newspaper article lol

27. Would you like to be a big celebrity?

Not really, I just want to be able to wear gorgeous gowns and walk down a red carpet and pose haha. And also be interviewed, I pretend I’m interviewed a lot in my head.

28. What type of music do you like?

I listen to a little bit of everything in spanish and english, but mostly pop, rock, soft rock, oldies, r&b, hip hop. Like shoes, there is also a playlist for every occasion. 

29. Have you ever been skinny dipping?

NOT YET!

30. How many pillows do you sleep with?

four

31. What position do you usually sleep in?

on my tummy, arms under my head, making a four with my legs (if you know, you know)

32. How big is your house?

big enough

33. What do you typically have for breakfast?

an egg dish of some kind.

34. Have you ever fired a gun?

nerf gun lol

35. Have you ever tried archery?

No, but my middle school BF, Legolas Greenleaf, Prince of Mirkwood was really good at that.

36. Favorite clean word?

luscious

37. Favorite swear word?

Fuck

38. What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without sleep?

24 hours i think

39. Do you have any scars?

Oh, ya...thanks Padmé

40. Have you ever had a secret admirer?

Not that I know of...

41. Are you a good liar?

Ha! No! My best friend says my voice gets two octaves higher when I’m lying haha

42. Are you a good judge of character?

I believe so, yes.

43. Can you do any other accents other than your own?

I mean, I’ve tried to do British, that’s what happens when you grow up watching LOTR, Harry Potter, and Pirates of the Caribbean over and over lol

44. Do you have a strong accent?

My Spanish and English are unaccented, but i’m sure when i travel to other parts of the country they know I’m “not from ‘round these parts.”

45. What is your favourite accent?

One time I heard a man from Holland speak and I’ve never heard an accent as beautiful since. But usually I like New Zealand accents.

46. What is your personality type?

Chill and funny.

47. What is your most expensive piece of clothing?

Probably my faux leather jacket

48. Can you curl your tongue?

Yes

49. Are you an innie or an outie?

innie

50. Left or right-handed?

right

51. Are you scared of spiders?

Fuck yeah, especially tarantulas. 

52. Favourite food?

Egg rolls

53. Favourite foreign food?

Chinese

54. Are you a clean or messy person?

My personal spaces are messy...there is order in the chaos, though.

55. Most used phrase?

“You guys are bad, bad kitties.” 

56. Most used word?

“Ubie” one of the many nicknames for my younger brother.

57. How long does it take for you to get ready?

about 30 minutes

58. Do you have much of an ego?

it exists and is a fickle thing

59. Do you suck or bite lollipops?

suck and then bite when it’s been weakened lol

60. Do you talk to yourself?

oh yeah

61. Do you sing to yourself?

mmhmm

62. Are you a good singer?

no, not really, but that ain’t gonna stop me

63. Biggest Fear?

living an inauthentic, unfulfilling life.

64. Are you a gossip?

I like to listen to tea being spilled, I just really like a good story. 

65. Best dramatic movie you’ve seen?

The Prestige

66. Do you like long or short hair?

Long

67. Can you name all 50 states of America?

I think so

68. Favourite school subject?

History/English

69. Extrovert or Introvert?

introvert

70. Have you ever been scuba diving?

no

71. What makes you nervous?

being thrown into unfamiliar situations

72. Are you scared of the dark?

No (my best friend slept with a night light when we were growing up and it was the worst part of sleeping over, but I weaned her off of it eventually!)

73. Do you correct people when they make mistakes?

Sure, kindly, the same way I’d like to be corrected.

74. Are you ticklish?

yes

75. Have you ever started a rumour?

no

76. Have you ever been in a position of authority?

yeah, at work. it’s weird, I do not feel like the kind of person who should be in a leadership position. I’ve always thought that was a thing for loud, confident people haha

77. Have you ever drank underage?

yeah

78. Have you ever done drugs?

like weed/edibles lol

79. Who was your first real crush?

Cody in fourth and fifth grade.

80. How many piercings do you have?

seven

81. Can you roll your R’s?

Yes

82. How fast can you type?

pretty fast

83. How fast can you run?

Like if I have a good reason to, my ass will sprint fast.

84. What colour is your hair?

It’s naturally a dark brown, but right now the roots are dark and the rest is lighter because i’m a dumbass who wanted rose gold hair 

85. What color is your eyes?

dark brown

86. What are you allergic to?

I think the combination of avocado and tomato causes some kind of reaction because every time I eat it, my lips feel all tingly and swollen.

87. Do you keep a journal?

I have a lot of journals that I occasionally will write in.

88. What do your parents do?

Their best. lol. My dad is a facilities director and my mom can’t work because of her chronic illnesses. But she was a teacher in Mexico, and worked at all kinds of things here before her health got too bad.

89. Do you like your age?

Sure

90. What makes you angry?

assholes lol people who don’t realize or care about the fact that we’re all on the same damn rock with the same needs. 

91. Do you like your own name?

I do, yes.

92. Have you already thought of baby names, and if so what are they?

haha I really like the name Agustín

93. Do you want a boy a girl for a child?

doesn’t matter

94. What are you strengths?

i’m compassionate and love deeply

95. What are your weaknesses?

i’m compassionate and love deeply lmao jk. It can be difficult to set boundaries

96. How did you get your name?

Named after both my grandmothers, they were quite different women and I think I got some of the best stuff from both.

97. Were your ancestors royalty?

Not likely, probably more like merchants. I’m convinced my mom’s side of the family left Spain because of some shaddy stuff haha or to incest in peace lmao

98. Do you have any scars?

Yeah, thanks Padmé

99. Colour of your bedspread?

It’s summer so i’m only using a flat sheet right now, it’s purple.

100. Colour of your room?

blue, specifically the shade azure

Tagging: @lazingonsunday @lantern-inthenight @gretavanfleetlife @littlegeekwonder @dreams-madeof-strawberrylemonade @eatmyshiftsticky @jeordinevankiszka @myownparadise96 @michaalien @mr-stank-i-dont-feel-so-dank @okietrish @thebatphone

[redheadnamedabigail13]

Taylor Swift: Music Week Magazine

November 4, 2019

Around this time of year, the Taylor Swift anniversaries come at you thick and fast.

Nine years since her third album, Speak Now, every note of which was written entirely by Swift, hit the shelves. Five years since she released her mould-breaking pop album, 1989, and went from the world’s biggest country star to the world’s biggest pop star overnight. Two years since her Reputation record saw her become the only musician to post four successive million-plus debut sales weeks in the United States. And so on.

But today, Swift’s mind is drawn further back, to the 13th anniversary of her debut, self-titled record, and the days when her album releases weren’t automatically accompanied by mountains of hype and enough think-pieces to sink a battleship. Her journal entries from the time – helpfully reprinted as part of the deluxe editions of her new album, Lover – reveal her as an excited, optimistic teenager, but also one with a grasp of marketing strategies and label politics way beyond her years, even if she was reluctant to actually take credit for her ideas.

“It always was and it always will be an interesting dance being a young woman in the music industry,” she smiles ruefully. “We don’t have a lot of female executives, we’re working on getting more female engineers and producers but, while we are such a drastic gender minority, it’s interesting to try and figure out how to be.”

And, of course, when Swift started out she was, as she points out, “an actual kid”.

“I was planning the release of my first album when I was 15 years old,” she reminisces. “And I was a fully gangly 15, I reminded everyone of their niece! I was in this industry in Nashville and country music, where I was making album marketing calls, but I never wanted to stand up and say, ‘Yeah, that promotions plan you just complimented my label on, I thought of that! Me and my Mom thought of that!’

“When you’re a new artist you wonder how much space you can take up and, as a woman, you wonder how much space you can take up pretty much your whole period of growing up,” she continues. “For me, growing up and knowing that I was an adult was realising that I was allowed to take up space from a marketing perspective, from a business perspective, from an opinionated perspective. And that feels a lot better than constantly trying to wonder if I’m allowed to be here.”

In the intervening years, Taylor Swift has released six further, brilliant albums, growing from country starlet to all-conquering pop behemoth along the way. She takes up “more space”, as she would put it, than any other musician on the planet: a sales and now – having belatedly embraced the format with Lover – streaming phenomenon; a powerhouse stadium performer; an award-garlanded songwriter for herself and others; and a social media giant with a combined 278 million followers across Instagram, Twitter and Facebook (which would make the Taylor Nation the fourth most populous one on earth, after China, India and the US).

But her influence on music and the music industry doesn’t end there. Because, over the years, Swift has also become a leading advocate for artists’ and songwriters’ rights, in a digital landscape that doesn’t always have such matters as a priority.

In 2015, she stood up to Apple Music over its plans to not pay artist royalties during subscribers’ three-month free trials (Apple backed down immediately). She pulled her entire catalogue from Spotify in 2014 in protest that its free tier was devaluing music, sending Daniel Ek scrambling to justify his business model. When she returned in 2017, it was a crucial fillip for the streaming service’s IPO plans.

More recently, her ground-breaking new record deal with Republic Records contained clauses not only guaranteeing her ownership of her future masters, but also ensuring Universal Music will share the spoils of its Spotify shares with its artists, without any payments counting against unrecouped balances. And when her long-time former label boss Scott Borchetta sold Big Machine to Scooter Braun’s Ithaca Holdings, taking Swift’s first six albums with him, the star publicly called out what she saw as her “worst-case scenario” and stressed: “You deserve to own the art you make”. She may yet re-record her old songs in protest.

In short, Swift has, for a long time now, been unafraid to use her voice on industry matters, whether they pertain to her own stellar career or the thousands of other artists out there struggling to make a living.

All of which makes Swift not just the greatest star of our age, but perhaps the most important to the future development of the industry as a more artist-centric, songwriter-friendly business. Hers is still the life of the pop phenomenon – she spent today in Los Angeles doing promotion and photoshoots (or, in her words, “having people put make-up on me”) as Lover continues to build on huge critical acclaim and even huger initial sales. But now, she’s kicking back with her cats – one of whom seems determined to disrupt Music Week’s interview by “stampeding” through at every opportunity – and ready to talk business.

And for Swift, business is good. The impact of her joining streaming, and the decline of traditional album sales, may have prevented her from posting a fifth successive one million-plus sales debut, but Lover still sold more US copies (867,000) in its first week than any record since her own Reputation. It’s sold 117,513 copies to date in the UK, according to the Official Charts Company.

Even better, while Reputation – a record forged in the white heat of a social media snakestorm over her on-going feud with Kanye West – was plenty of show and rather less grow, Lover continues to reveal hidden depths. Reputation struck a sometimes curious contrast between the unrepentant warrior Swift she was showing to the outside world and the love story with British actor Joe Alwyn that was quietly developing behind closed doors, but Lover is the sort of versatile, cohesive album that the streaming age was supposed to kill off.

It contains more than its fair share of pop bangers (You Need To Calm Down, Me!), but also some gorgeously-crafted acoustic tracks (Lover, Cornelia Street), some pithy political commentary (The Man, Miss America & The Heartbreak Prince) and the sort of musical diversions (Paper Rings’ irresistible rockabilly stomp, the childlike oddity of It’s Nice To Have A Friend) that no other pop superstar would have the sheer musical chops to attempt, let alone pull off.

“Taylor’s creative instincts as an artist and songwriter are brilliant,” says Monte Lipman, founder and CEO of Swift’s US label, Republic. “Our partnership represents a strategic alliance built on mutual respect, trust, and complete transparency. Her vision is extraordinary as she sets the tone for every campaign and initiative.”

No wonder David Joseph, chairman/CEO of her long-time UK label Virgin EMI’s parent company Universal Music UK, is thrilled with how things are going.

“Love Story was a fitting first single release for Taylor here – she’s loved the UK from day one and has engaged so much with her fans and teams,” says Joseph. “She really respects and values what’s going on here creatively. To see her go from playing the Students’ Union at King’s College to Wembley Stadium has been extraordinary. Taylor is an artist constantly striving for perfection, and with Lover – from my personal point of view, her most accomplished work to date – her songwriting has gone to a new level. I adore working with her and whilst it’s been more than 10 years this still feels like the start.”

And today, Swift is keen to concentrate on the present and future. She has a starring role in Cats coming up (and a new song on the soundtrack, Beautiful Ghosts, co-written with Andrew Lloyd Webber) and, after a spectacularly intimate Paris launch show in September, festival dates and her own LoverFest to plan (UK shows will be revealed soon). Time, then, to tell the cats to calm down and sit down with Music Week to talk streaming, contracts and why she’s “obsessed” with the music industry…

Unlike with Reputation, most of the discussion around Lover seems to have been focused on the music…

“Absolutely! One of the ideas I had about this record, and something I’ve implemented into my life in the last couple of years is that I don’t like distractions. And, for a while, it felt like my life had to come with distractions from the music, whether it was tabloid fascination with my personal life or my friendships or what I was wearing. I realised in the last couple of years that, if I don’t give a window into distraction, people can’t try to look in and see something other than the music. I love that, if you really pour yourself into the idea that an album is still important and try really hard to make something that is worth people’s attention span, time and energy, that can still come across. Because we are living in an industry right now where everyone’s rushing towards taking us into a singles industry and, in some cases, it has become that. But there are still some cases where clearly the album is important to people.”

Does it matter that some new artists won’t get to make albums the way you always have?

“It’s interesting. Five years ago I wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal and said, maybe in the next five years, we would see artists releasing music the way that they want to. I thought that each artist would start to curate what is important to them, not just from an artistic standpoint but from a marketing standpoint. It’s really interesting to see different release plans, if you look at what Drake did and then what Beyoncé does, incredible artists who have really curated what it is to drop music in their own way. We all do it differently, which is cool. As long as people dropping just singles want to be doing that, then I’m fine with it, but if it feels like a big general wave that’s being pressured by people in power, their teams or their labels, that’s not cool. But I do really hope that in the future artists have more of a say over strategy. We’re not just supposed to make art and then hand it to a team that masterminds it.”

Were you worried about putting an album on streaming on release day for the first time?

“Well, there are ways that streaming services could really promote the [whole] album in a more incentivised way. We could have album charts on streaming. The industry follows where they can get prizes. So you have a singles chart on streaming services which is great but, if you split things up into genre charts for example, that would really incentivise people. It’s important that we keep trying to strive to make the experience better for users but also make it more interesting for artists to keep wanting to achieve. But I really did love the experience of putting the album on streaming. I loved the immediacy, I loved that people who maybe weren’t a huge diehard fan were curious and saying, ‘I wonder what this is like’ and listening to it and deciding that they liked it.”

You’d resisted streaming for a long time. Have you changed your mind about the format now?

“I always knew that I would enjoy the aspects of streaming that make [your music] so immediately available to so many people. That’s the part of it that I unequivocally always felt really sad I was missing out on. There wasn’t ever a day when I woke up and I was like, ‘Oh, I’m really glad that multitudes of people don’t have access to my music!’ So I always knew that streaming was an incredible mechanism and model for the future but I still don’t think we have the royalties and compensation system worked out. That’s between the labels and their artists and I realised that me, to use a gross word, ‘leveraging’ what I can bring to cut a better deal for the artists at my record label was really important for me.”

How big a factor were things like that in you signing to Republic/Universal?

“That’s important to me because that means they’re adopting some of my ideas. If they take me on as an artist that means they really thought it through. Because with me, come opinions about how we can better our industry. I’m one of the only people in the artist realm who can be loud about it. People who are on their fifth, sixth or seventh album, we’re the only ones who can speak out, because new artists and producers and writers need to work. They need to be endearing and likeable and available to their labels and streaming services at all times. It’s up to the artists who have been around for a second to say, ‘Hey guys, the producers and the writers and the artists are the ones who are making music what it is’. And we’re in a great place in music right now thanks to them. They should be going to their mailbox and feeling like they’ve got a pension plan, rather than feeling like, ‘Oh yay, I can pay half my rent this month after this No.1 song’.”

Did you have more creative freedom making Lover than on your previous albums?

“In my previous situation, there were creative constraints, issues that we had over the years. I’ve always given 100% to projects, I always over-delivered, thinking that that generosity would be returned to me. But I ended up finding that generosity in a new situation with a new label that understands that I deserve to own what I make. That meant so much to me because it was given over to me so freely. When someone just looks at you and says ‘Yes, you deserve what you want’, after a decade or more of being told, ‘I’m not sure you deserve what you want’ – there’s a freedom that comes with that. It’s like when people find ‘the one’ they’re like, ‘It was easy, I just knew and I felt free’. All of a sudden you’re being told you’re worth exactly, no, more than what you thought you were worth. And that made me feel I could make an album that was exactly what I wanted to make. There’s an eclectic side to Lover, a confessional side, it varies from acoustic to really poppy pop, but that’s what I like to do. And, while you would never make something artistic based on something so unromantic as a contract, it was more than that. It was a group of people saying, ‘We believe in what you’re making, go make what you want to make and you deserve to own it too’.”

You’re obviously not happy about what’s happened at Big Machine since you left. But will the attention mean artists don’t find themselves in this situation in the future?

“I hope so. That’s the only reason that I speak out about things. The fans don’t understand these things, the public isn’t being made aware. This generation has so much information available to them so I thought it was important that the fans knew what I was going through, because I knew it was going to affect every aspect of my life and I wanted them to be the first to know. And in and amongst that group, I know there are people that want to make music some day. It involves every new artist that is reading that and going, ‘Wait, that’s what I’m signing?’ They don’t have to sign stuff that’s unfair to them. If you don’t ask the right questions and you sit in front of the wrong desk in front of the wrong person, they can take everything from you.”

Songwriters are in dispute with Spotify in the US over its decision to appeal the Copyright Board decision to boost songwriting royalties. Do writers need more respect?

“Absolutely. In terms of the power structure, the songwriters, the producers, the engineers, the people who are breathing magic into our industry, need to be listened to. They’re not being greedy. This is legitimately an industry where people are having trouble paying their bills and they’re the most talented people we have. This isn’t them sitting in their mansions going, ‘I wish this mansion was bigger and I would like a yacht please’. This is actually people who are going to work every single day. I got into writing when I was in Nashville and it was very much like what I read about the Brill Building. You would write every day, whether you were inspired or not, and in the process I met artists and writers. Somebody would walk in and someone would say, ‘Oh, he’s still getting mailbox money from that Faith Hill cut a couple of years ago, he’s set’. That’s not a thing anymore. Mailbox money is a thing of the past and we need to remember that these are the people that create the heartbeat that we’re all dancing to or crying to.”

You were clearly aware of music industry machinations from a young age…

“Reading back on the journal entries, I forgot how obsessed I was with the industry as a teenager. I was so fascinated by how it works and how it was changing. Every part of it was interesting to me. I had drawn the stages for most of my tours a year before I went on them. That really was fun for me as a teenager! A lot of people who start out very young in music, either don’t have a say or don’t have the will to do the business side of it, but weirdly that was so much fun for me to try and learn. I had a lot of energy when I was 16!”

Are you doing similar drawings for next year’s LoverFest?

“Definitely. And that’s why it’s still fun for me to take on a challenge like, ‘Oh, let’s just plan our own festival’. Let’s create a bill of artists and try and make it as fun as possible for the fans. I’m so intrigued by what that’s going to be like.”

Finally, when we last did an interview in 2015, you said in five years’ time you wanted to be “finding complexity in happiness”. How has that worked out?

“That’s exactly what’s happened with this album! I think a lot of writers have the fear of stability, emotional health and happiness. Our whole careers, people make jokes about how, ‘Just wait until you meet someone nice, you’ll run out of stuff to write about’. I was talking to [Cats director] Tom Hooper about this because he said one thing his mother taught him was, ‘Don’t ever let people tell you that you can’t make art if you’re happy’. I thought that was so amazing. He’s a creator in a completely different medium but he has been subjected to that same joke over and over again that we must be miserable to create. Lover is important to me in so many ways, but it’s so imperative for me as a human being that songwriting is not tied to my own personal misery. It’s good to know that, it really is!”

@taylorswift @taylornation

[double-danganronpa-lost-faith]

DDR:LF Progress Log

Hi everyone! Welcome to the first progress log.

It’s a post where I put all the things I’ve done for the fanganronpa so far that I haven’t posted anywhere; most of them are WIPs or Betas. It also works for me as a way to keep track of how far I’ve come.

Today’s post contains the following:

Character Bios (previously only available in the DR amino) and FAQ

4 WIPs of important CGs (well... more like 2)

3 Different types of Animation Tests

WIP/Beta of the GUI Design

Next objectives

If you’re interested in checking this post, keep reading it down below!

By the way, feel free to join the fangan’s discord server by going to this link https://discordapp.com/invite/aSd6PN4 ^^ with that being said, let’s begin the post~!

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Character Bios and FAQ

To start this blog AND this post on a right note, I’m finally posting on tumblr the character bios, which means you can now access to the information from each member of the cast of DDR:LF, which was previously only available in amino. You can find them in this post.

As for the other part, I wrote a FAQ with the main sort of questions there could be about the fangan. Feel free to give it a read here if you want to know about some basic stuff about the project, and if you still have doubts, please do send an ask! I’ll gladly answer it ^^

WIPs of CGs

You didn’t think that the only drawing I was working on were sprites, right?

In today’s post, here are some CGs WIPs that I didn’t get around to finish yet (since their priority is below the character sprites, but it’s a nice change instead of doing sprites 24/7).

First, the pre-trial CGs!

There are some expressions/positions that I might be willing to change, although that’ll come in later when I gotta sit down to finish these. But yeah, later. (Also, just to be clear, I drew these waaay back, so the designs might not match the current ones).

In a trial, depending the type of chapter, the 1st CG and 3rd one will switch places. The one that appears last will be the one that contains the protagonist whose POV we are witnessing.

Second, one of every prologue’s main CGs. “The killing game has begun!”

Looks of doubt and deceith are flying across the room! Who will make it through the end of the day? And who’ll be left behind~?

It might seem pretty basic without them being colored, but hopefully it’ll look better in the future!

Animation Tests

Man, this was a lot of fun to work on, and it was all worth it! I hope you all enjoy these as much as I did while trying to materialize these concepts!

#1 - Prologue Title Card

Every chapter of this story has a title card, just like the original danganronpa games. In the case of DDR:LF, this is more or less what each card will look like.

It’s kinda basic; elements being added to the screen here and there, as well as some silhouettes appearing.

What are these silhouettes, you might ask? It’s none other than the cast of the fangan, but it’s not just anybody who’s randomly picked. The silhouettes belong to the victims and the murderers of the current chapter, so for example, chapter 1 will have the silhouette of the 1st victim and the 1st murderer, but it’ll be modified enough for the silhouette to not be easily recognizable; nobody wants to get spoiled the deaths right at the start of the chapter, right?

Of course, the prologue is an exception... maybe.

A bit of the BGM was done by me, while some other elements of it were taken off from royalty free sound effects/melodies websites.

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#2 - Pixel Execution

As you all know, there’s always a pixel animation that starts off an execution. I have that too, of course! and in order to avoid spoilers + show you what I was able to do, I put myself in the place of the culprit. (I swear I didn’t kill off anyone yet... only after the fangan has started I’ll be considered guilty).

The background music was also composed entirely by me, although in the future it might change- but I don’t really know for certain, so get used to this for now :)

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#3 - Execution style test

I’ve recently downloaded the program Live2D, and what for? For executions, no less! After trying it for a while, I’ve concluded that it’d simplify my job a lot more than if I used sony vegas for animating the executions (not to mention it looks smoother with this new one).

For this test, I’ve used Seiji as my puppet. It might be simple, but it was to test out the limits of the program. It turned out really good imo! So I’ve decided to use Live2D to animate the executions (or at least, do most parts of them with it). I learnt some stuff while experimenting around with the program, so next time I’ll finish these sort of things even faster probably.

Also I put it on loop because a 2 second video is rather sad.

GUI Design

Now, I'll admit that I'm not the best at GUI design, but I tried my best to come up with my own design for the fanganronpa's interface, which I made based on a water-ish looking theme. The (not final) result of that is the picture below.

In case that you’re wondering, no, this isn’t any sort of canon conversation. It’s just the phrase I could come up with.

And yes, the background is from V3; I don't have any backgrounds at all for the project yet lol.

The sun and the fish on the top right corner will change depending on the time of day; but that's something that I'll keep to myself until the moment I start posting the story.

I have conflicted feelings with this GUI though, I don't know if I like it or not. It looks somewhat good but still off at the same time? Although it might just be me. If anyone has any feedback or suggestion for the GUI's design, the inbox is always open to receive such help!

So what's next?

Currently, I have loads of assignments at college, so it's kinda hard to make a balance between the project, social life and college work. However, the project is something that won’t stop.

The fangan has only one member, which is me of course; that means it’s going at a slow pace. I'm willing to make a recruitment for help, but that’ll be later once I have the basics to let someone else help me. If you’re willing to volunteer for this project, keep heads eyes up for the day I call out for help.

In the past, I tried to learn how to program with unity, but it’s hard to follow it up when the free tutorials are scattered here and there. When I have free time and everything art-related has been set up, I might try to pick it up again. I say might because I’m gonna start a tiny course for unreal engine at college. Maybe with the basics that they teach there, I’ll be able to do a better/quicker job than if I did it with unity (which I have 0 experience with). But the future is uncertain, so I’ll be the judge of that once I’m done with that course!

With that being said... as of now, the next objectives for the project (not ordered by priority) are the following:

Finishing Default Sprites.

I only have 7 default sprites done out of the 16 students, and I’m already working on the 8th. Half-way there?

Concept Art for each Room/Place.

While I have written down all the places in each dome, there are some that I need to draw the concept of the place, since the idea in my mind keeps changing them, I should settle them down.

Finishing Writing the Prologue and the Basics of Chapter 1.

I mean I already have like a half of these two things or more, but since I keep changing it, they never get any actual progress. Maybe I should learn to let it be as it is lol.

Creating 3D Assets.

Of course, I’ll make the 3D models for the rooms and props... well, I might do them; that is if I can’t find anyone that can make them. Pros of this is that I can do things exactly how I want them; cons are that it takes time and I’m not an expert in 3D modeling.

Trial GUI.

Class trials in danganronpa have a different GUI than the one used outside of them. We have a beta for the general GUI up there, now we need one for the class trial’s as well!

Concept Art for... a Trial Thing.

It’s no surprise that there are special things in fanganronpas, such as making changes to certain game mechanics, or creating completely new ones. The one I’m refering to in this case is a change to an already existing mechanic in the DR games. Can you guess which one it is~?

Splash Art.

During the first year of birthdays, I drew some sketches for the characters; those are the base for their future splash art.

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And last (and currently least important)

Recruiting Volunteers for the Project.

Obviously, I can’t do everything in this project by myself. In the future, once I have made a base for every ground of the project, I’ll recruit people that can work from there. Artists (GUI,CG and Sprite), Compositors, and 3D modelers are the ones that I’ll be looking for in this recruitment. In an even-later recruitment, I’ll make a casting call for voice actors as well. Please be patient though!

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I suppose that’s it for this very long post. It took more days than expected to put everything together, but at last I can release it now!

Now, June and July are pretty busy months at college, so unfortunatelly the progress will slow down a lot more than usual for the next few weeks. Thanks for sticking around this project despite the long road it has ahead! ^^

See you all in the next post! And if you read this entire thing, thank you for your interest in the fangan! <3

[venusori]

Stars in the Making Chapter 1

Hello all~ Please like and reblog if you enjoy! This is a Zen x MC acting fic!

Also uploaded on my wattpad and ao3

I wait in line patiently, signing in my name once I make it to the front. There are so many people here… and I’ll make sure to be the best. We all are auditioning for the same musical: Pirates of Penzance.

I had played in it in high school as one of the policemen, and I’m excited about the chance to play in it again since it is one of my favorite plays. As I examine the competition, a lump forms in my throat.

I pull out a mirror and re-apply my lipstick and touch up my hair. I take a couple of deep breaths and feel my confidence come back. I put the mirror away and wait for my name to be called.

I meet with some of the other people auditioning, picking up their phone numbers while waiting. There is one man in particular who I give my number to that sticks out. He has vibrant red eyes and long, silver hair. He stays in my mind even when I chat with the others auditioning.

I wait in line patiently, signing in my name once I make it to the front. There are so many people here… and I’ll make sure to be the best. We all are auditioning for the same musical: Pirates of Penzance.

I had played in it in high school as one of the policemen, and I’m excited about the chance to play in it again since it is one of my favorite plays. As I examine the competition, a lump forms in my throat.

I pull out a mirror and re-apply my lipstick and touch up my hair. I take a couple of deep breaths and feel my confidence come back. I put the mirror away and wait for my name to be called.

I meet with some of the other people auditioning, picking up their phone numbers while waiting. There is one man in particular who I give my number to that sticks out. He has vibrant red eyes and long, silver hair. He stays in my mind even when I chat with the others auditioning.

“Next, MC,” a tired-sounding man says from the other end of the room. I stand up and walk to the door with my sheet music for the accompanist. I shake the director's hand, and pass the sheet music to the accompanist, with the measures I need her to play marked for her.

I walk to the stage, stand center downstage, facing the director, and wait for instruction.

The director cues the pianist, and I begin singing a passage from Regina Spektor’s “Eet,” getting lost in the music, tapping my toe inside my shoe to the beat.

The rest of the audition goes smoothly. I am very confident in my skill. I leave the theater and get into my car to drive home, anxiously waiting for cast results.

                                                                       A week later, I check the official website, anxiously searching for the cast list. I decide to read it bottom up when I find it, looking at the minor roles before the major roles.

Slowly, I read the cast list. Not seeing my name anywhere towards the bottom, I checked the lead roles, scared I didn't make the cut.

There it is. I made it as Mabel! My heart jumps with excitement. I scan the cast list again, barely believing my eyes. I pinch my arm - it's real!

Immediately after I begin to calm down, I receive a phone call from someone I had met at the auditions. Zen.

“Hello?”

“Hello, ah... were you cast as Mabel for Pirates of Penzance?” I hear a nervous voice on the other end.

“Yes! That's me,” I say, unable to help my grin. Hearing someone else say that I had gotten the role made it feel all the more real. “My name is MC. I’m assuming you’re Zen?”

           “Haha, that's me!” He says, excitement in his voice. “Look, I like to get to know my fellow actors before the show, and I was wondering if you would like to hang out sometime?”

           Very forward. “Ah… sure,” I say. “If you’d like, you could come over to my place? We could get a head start on the lines. I am free anytime until the play starts -  I like to focus on one production at a time.”

           “Of course,” he says, calmer than before. “Anytime you would like to meet, I would be happy to see you.”

           “I’ll text you my information in a bit,” I say.

           “Mmhm. Talk to you then!”

We say our goodbyes. I pull out my laptop and do a bit of research on Zen. I type his name into the search engine to see a Wikipedia page on him. I read through and get a general idea of what he is like and of his past and such. I decide he is safe enough to invite over, and I text him my address.

           I take a look around my home. I need to clean up a bit before he comes over, as well as make dinner. I tell him to come over at around five thirty and to bring some games if he had any. I jump up to start working on the house, cleaning up whatever mess there is.

           I run around the house, making sure everything looks perfect. I then start to work on making dinner for the two of us. I want to make a good impression. I decide to make alfredo, since I can make it quick. I begin working on the dish, singing along to some music playing on my phone and turning the cooking process into a dance.

           After about forty five minutes, I hear a knock on my door. I rush to turn my music off and run to the door. I look out the peephole and see it's him. Zen. I feel a rush of anxiety as I go to open the door. What if he isn’t a good person? What if I find out I hate him and don’t want to act with him? I shake my head, put on a smile, and open the door. He greets me first.             

           “Hello, beautiful MC,” he says. I open the door wider to allow him in. “You don't have any cats, right?”

I shake my head, and he breathes a sigh of relief as he steps in, setting a green bag down on the floor next to where he takes his shoes off. “Fur allergy?”

           “Just cats,” he says.

           I nod. “Well, I made dinner. Does pasta work?”

           “You didn't have to cook for me!” He exclaims, surprised. With a flirtatious edge to his words, he adds, “But I certainly won't say no to a lady’s cooking.”

           “Come with me.” I smile and lead him into the kitchen. I tell him to sit at the dining table while I dish his plate for him.

           “Treating me like royalty! It's you who should be treated like a princess,” he says.

           “Well, then, good sir, will you be my prince?” I ask, an idea forming in my head. Zen blushes lightly. Before he could speak, I say, “Or will you be my pirate who attempts to slay my father?”

           He stands up, changing his demeanor instantly. “Good Mabel, it was not my choice, for it was my duty!”

           “Ha, you said duty,” I joke. “Sit, I’m not there yet!”

           He sits back down in his seat and watches me intently. I reach into a drawer and pull out two forks, grab the plates, and walk over to the table. I set his plate and his fork down in front of him.

           “It smells wonderful. Thank you,.” he says.

           I smile and nod. “Do you pray before eating?”

           “I’m atheist - I only believe in one god, and that would be me,” He says, a playful tone in his voice. “Do you?”

           “Only before a show,” I explain. “I don't believe in any god, but I do believe that if the cast wants to pray, then I will pray with them.”

           “Cast prayers get interesting sometimes.” He chuckles, taking a bite. “‘Please, do not let Allan slip on the papers scattered on the ground again.’”

           “That one has nothing on one I've heard - ‘God, please bless the cast to not spill their water backstage and nearly kill me,’” I quote. “A lot of salt in that prayer.”

           “Tell me it wasn't you who spilled,” he says.

           “No, I follow the rules, promise,” I say, raising my hands defensively. “Does it taste alright?”

           Zen nods. “It's wonderful. It's, like, Olive Garden quality.”

           “Ooh, comparing my last minute cooking to Olive Garden? Suck up,” I joke.

           “Not a suck up,” he says. “It does taste nice.”

           I stand up, remembering that I forgot to offer him a drink. “Water?” I ask, walking to my fridge to grab two bottles of water. I step back and hand him one.

           He thanks me, grabbing the water and setting it down next to his plate.

           The two of us finish up quickly, excited to get to know each other better. After finishing, I take his dish and set it next inside the sink for later. We head into the living room.

           “So, I brought some cards. Do you know the game Trash?” He asks. I nod - it is a well-loved game of mine, seeing as I always teach my fellow actors to play it to keep their minds busy before the performance and to help ease nerves.

           “One of my favorite games. Wanna sit on the floor?” I ask, grabbing some pillows off the couch to sit on. He takes one, thanking me.

           “One requirement,” I say. “I can't shuffle..  Would you?”

           “Of course, lovely Mabel,” he jokes, and starts to shuffle. “Wanna mix the game up a bit?”

           “How so?” I ask.

           “When I move on to the next number, I must answer a question that the other person asks me. But it has to be safe for work.”

           I chuckle. “Sure, since this is to get to know each other, yeah?”

           He passes me my stack of cards to lay out on the floor. I lay out the cards in front of me, preparing a list of questions in my head.

           A round passes quickly. I win and move on to nine cards. Zen gets to ask me a question now.

           “Hm… any superstitions, besides the normal ones, such as the ‘Scottish play’?” he asks.

           “Hmmm..” I think for a moment. “I never request a mic. Otherwise, something bad with the mics will happen. If they give me one, cool. But I will never ask to get one.”

           “Is there a story about that?” He asks.

           “Ooh, that sounds like another question for when I win again,” I tease, passing him my cards so he can shuffle the cards into the deck. He repeats the earlier process, passing me my stack of nine cards, keeping ten for himself. He sets the deck in the center. Since I win, it is his turn to go first.

           I win the round, but he flips his cards and re-arranges the wild cards in front of him on his turn. Both of us get to ask a question.

           “You ask first, since I am the one who won first,” I state.

           “Favorite animal?” He asks.

           “I like dogs a lot, never been much of a cat person. But if we are talking about non-pet animals, I love puffins… or seahorses, if they count,” I say thoughtfully. He looks at me intently, clearly interested in my answer. I think of a question to ask him. “Hmm… pre-show routine?”

           “Depends on the show,” he says. “I mainly do musicals, so I steam my voice and do lots of stretches. For a play, I will generally try and focus more on the co-actors and make sure they're doing well, since I don't want to do any line rehearsing the day of the show. I show them a photo my friend took that always helps calm my nerves.”

           “Very kind, helping my other actors,” I say. “I like that.”

           I end up learning a lot about him, from things to his favorite color to his morning routine. He also finds out things about me, like my favorite flower and my natural hair color. I regularly dye my hair, sometimes for roles, but also sometimes for a fun color while I’m not in any productions. Of course, he gives me a lecture about how that will damage my hair, but I shrug it off, already knowing how it goes after hearing it a million times. I take great care of my hair other than that, so it feels alright anyway.

           After playing the card game, I decide to watch the movie that is based on the show we will be performing.

           I pulled the movie up on my TV. Pirates of Penzance, (1983). We both had seen it before, so I decide I would sing along with my parts. After hearing him in other shows, I am excited how he would use his voice to portray the character.

           The two of us have a blast practicing. From start to finish, we sing every song and spoke our individual lines. We help each other with each other’s parts as best as we can, and when one is in a duet or trio, the other sings the other part for them. I have a fun time singing as Ruth a few times for him. He struggles to pull off Sargent in a few spots, but he enjoys it nonetheless. The two of us thoroughly enjoy acting the other parts - I make a great deputy.

           When the movie ends, we are still smiling from our practice. We both are even more excited for rehearsal. I can’t wait to practice other actions with him - but for now, just singing it together is enough.

           Am I beginning to fall in love with my co-star?

           No. That's against the rules! I would get kicked from my roles.

           Plus, I don't like him that way. Right? There certainly hasn't been enough time for me to like him.

           Anyways, it would be bad for my career if I were to have a thing for him.

           The two of us finish up for the night, since it was about eight, and it’s rude to keep anyone past that time, unless we’re romantically involved. He leaves, saying it’s time for the process to rest.

           I go to bed with thoughts filling my head. Thoughts of Zen. How can I work well with him on my mind like this?

[purplesurveys]

418

Girly Do you like the color pink? It’s my favorite color. My phone case, wallet, purse, expander, water jug, two notebooks, backpack, pencilcase, clipboard, and paper clips are all pink. What have you spent more money on: a purse or a pair of shoes? Definitely shoes. I have one purse but I didn’t even spend on it, as it was a gift from my tita who was coming over to the Philippines. Do you ever wear heels? I have pairs of heels but people in the PH are so conservative and judgy that you can’t really dress up without them looking at you. As much as I want to wear my heels to places, I can only do so when I go to parties or other special occasions. What are the most stylish but uncomfortable shoes you own? I dunno, I find all of them pretty comfortable. Do you have any shoes you mostly only wear for photo shoots? No...I never have any photoshoots.

What's your all-time favorite lipstick (brand and color)? I don’t do makeup. Do you buy drugstore make-up or high-end make-up? What dog breed do you think you look the most like? Hahahahahahaha what omg

Do you like light blue jeans or dark blue jeans better? Light blue. I think they’re more trendy at the moment. What are your favorite type of pants to wear? I like my high-waisted ripped jeans! They’re super casual and can match any top. I wear it if I just want a chill day. What's the last good love story you read? I haven’t read those in a hot minute. Who is/was the most romantic of your friends? Jo I think, but I’m pretty sure it would be JM if he finally finds someone. Have you ever had a magical kiss? Always. Do you like kissing or hugs better? Hugs!!! Retro Do you own any records? No. I don’t have a turntable to play them on. Do you own a pair of bell-bottoms? Also no. I was never a fan. Have you ever tie-dyed anything? We had to tie-dye a shirt for a project in like sixth grade, but I’ve never done it just because I felt like it. What's one oldies song you like? We Didn’t Start the Fire. Do you think Disco is a cute name for a boy? Not at all. Poor kid. Do you own a lava lamp or disco ball? I own neither, but I wanted my own lava lamp really bad when I was like 14. Did you own a disco light when you were younger? I don’t think I did. Have you ever put a dime in a jukebox? Haven’t. The few times I ate at Johnny Rockets they had a jukebox, but I didn’t go near it because I was shy. When was the last time you went to the roller rink? We don’t have any here. Do you wear hoop earrings ever? I have a pair of clip-on hoop earrings I wear at least once a week. Do you own a kaleidoscope? No. I probably did when I was younger. Have you ever done hard drugs? No. Tumblr What are three of your favorite Starbucks drinks? Java chip frappe, caramel macchiato (iced or warm is fine), and peppermint mocha are my go-tos. Do you have photos on the wall in your room? Yeah but they’re nothing like the Tumblr aesthetic you’re probably asking for. I have frames of Audrey Hepburn on one wall and a poster of a Korean actor that I love, but that’s about it.   If you own/owned a Polaroid camera, which color would/do you have? I’ve never had one but my sister just bought her own Instax the other week that I plan to borrow. It’s brown if I remember correctly. Have you ever done a craft with a record? if so, what? No. I don’t think I’d want to put my hands on a record like that either. What's one of the best Tumblr-inspired craft projects you've seen? Meh. I haven’t seen the crafty side of Tumblr since 2010. Do you have a Tumblr account? I wonder. Which do you like better: Tumblr or Pinterest? Tumblr for surveys and memes, Pinterest for ideas. Do you have a mandala tapestry hanging in your home? No...that screams 2014 to me. Do you own any succulents? I never got into plants. Fake succulents or real succulents? Do you doodle on your notebook paper? When I get bored in class, yes. Do you own Sharpies? Mmmm no, I don’t really need them for anything. What's your favorite Sharpie color? What color are your Converse shoes? White. I used to have a pair of red high-top Chucks as tribute to AJ, but I think my mom threw them out already because I stopped wearing them. Have you ever made an inspiration board for your room? No. Who is the best-looking male celebrity? Gregory Peck. Boho Where would you like to travel to next? Thailand or Vietnam, hopefully! List three more vacations you would like to go on. I want to go back to Singapore, then go to those two I mentioned above. Where are three places you go to relax? My room, the beach, a cafe. Are you a musician, artist, or writer? None of these, but writer speaks to me the most. Do you believe in truth, freedom, and love? ...Sure. What is your favorite store at the mall? I don’t have one I normally go to. Would you hitchhike if people were generally trustworthy? If I had the time, yep. What's the most daring thing you've ever done? Every time I overtake or be an ass on the road (because everyone else is) always feels daring lmao. Would you ever belly dance at a faire? No. If you became famous, would you change your name to something exotic? Idk, that’s kinda racist/appropriating. What are five exotic names that you like? What exactly are exotic names???? Do you own a dreamcatcher? Yeah, I have a large one above my bed. Do you feel closer to God in nature? No. Fashion What are five things that were in style when you were in high school? Roshes, ripped jeans, crop tops, statement shirts lmao, and hoodies. What does your favorite scarf that you've made look like? I don’t need scarves and more so have I not made my own. Do you wear scarves? No. It’s too hot for scarves. List the different colors of jeggings and/or skinny jeans that you have. White, black, dark blue, light blue, khaki. What color is your favorite pair of shorts? Black. What color is your favorite sweater? The XXL one Gabie gave me to use whenever I miss her is gray. List five people whom you think have great style. Audrey Hepburn, one of the profs in my college that has an impeccable wardrobe, Kate, Sophia, and tbh my aunts.

List five of some of the worst trends you've seen. I don’t feel like it. List five items on your current wardrobe wish list. More heels, high-waisted shorts, a new jumpsuit, a party dress for the year-end college party in May, and tube tops. Where do you shop the most for clothes? H&M. Do you own anything leopard print? No. Never. Do you wear earmuffs? I don’t need them. What color are your favorite pair of boots? I don’t really wear boots. Music What song makes you cry? Recently, it’s Louis Tomlinson’s singles- at least the ones dedicated to his mom. What could be the theme song to your life? That’s a pretty bold claim...but uhhh probably Misguided Ghosts by Paramore. What is a good break-up song? Walking in the Wind, One Direction. What song makes you want to dance? Any high-energy Beyonce song tbh. What is one of your all-time favorite songs? From Eden, Hozier. What is your current favorite song? Three straight surveys that this was asked. Talk, by Khalid. Which show has a great theme song? I don’t watch a lot of shows, so I wouldn’t know. Which song is so catchy it's easy to get stuck in your head? Depends on my mood and what my head prefers to play at the moment. Which song is used in a lot of youtube videos? Royalty-free ones? Idk. Which song is sad? The entire soundtrack of New Moon lmao. Who makes great song covers on YouTube? I don’t like covers. Who is one of the best songwriters? HOZIER Who has a beautiful voice? Also Hozier. Who made it big fast? Idk, it’s pretty easy to make it big fast nowadays thanks to social media. Arts and Crafts List five DIY youtubers you love to watch. I hate DIY YouTube. Who makes the best craft videos? Have you ever painted rocks and hid them in your town? No. Even if I had the time to, the idea doesn’t sound exciting. What craft project is harder than it looks? All of them, I would guess. Have you ever got hot glue stuck to your hands? Nooooo no no, that’s one of my biggest fears. Are you messy when it comes to painting? I’m messy in and out of painting. What color is your cutting board? Would you rather build something or decorate something? I’d rather buy something that’s already built and decorated. Just really not an artsy person so this category is not for me haha. Have you ever painted something on canvas? Never. I couldn’t, even if I tried. List a few of your favorite painters. Monet. Do you love the brand Natural Life? I don’t think I recognize the name. Do you love the brand Lisa Frank? Yessssss my girl Lisa used to be the bomb dot com. Oil pastels or chalk pastels? Which do you prefer, and why? Oil...they look nicer for me? And I’ve never heard of chalk pastels until now. Glitter gel pens or regular gel pens? Glitter. Colored pencil or regular pencil? Colored pencils, because I love coloring books. Charcoal or colored chalk? Chalk. Charcoal is messy. Painting or drawing? I hate both. Painting that shows brushstrokes or painting that looks like a photograph? I’d rather see the brushstrokes. Knitting or crocheting? I hate them both too. Sewing on a machine or doing embroidery by hand? Color or black-and-white? Color. Digital photography or film photography? Classic film.

[monotonemanday]

Star Crossed Entertainers - Part 9

People are skipping rehearsals, going on reckless drives. But that could turn into a cute date? Maybe some fluff? Maybe Sam will stop being such a downer? We’ll see! ;P Enjoy!!l

Kaeli’s arms were wrapped tight around Zen’s torso and her head was right next to his, peeking over his shoulder. They were zooming through back roads, twists and turns on an endless curvy path. Tree’s lined the streets and the sun was setting. Wearing her sundress her arms were getting cold. Each time a chill would run through her body she would tighten her hold on Zen even more. 

His face was so hot he wondered if she could feel the warmth through both their helmets since their heads were so close together. Zen’s heart was pounding and he couldn’t let off the throttle of the bike. He was going too fast, but all he was thinking about was the tiny pixie like blonde that was pasted on his back. Every time her arms tightened around him his heart would beat even faster. He took a turn too sharp and thought he might lose control of the bike. He brought his mind back down to earth and refocused on his driving. There is no way he would be responsible for anything happening to Kaeli. Besides…Sam would KILL him.

She didn’t mind the speed or the sporadic driving. She barely noticed. Kaeli loved the rush. Samantha, Kang-Dae, every employee that worked for him. They were all treating her like she was fragile. A baby. Zen treated her the way that she wanted. She felt free and in control of her own life. She wanted to be with him and when she was, no one was telling her how to behave, how to act or telling her to be cautious. 

Zen pulled off onto a dirt road that went deep into the tree line. About 5 minutes of driving in and they reached a clearing. A beautiful clearing with lush green grass and wildflowers blooming everywhere. In the middle of the clearing was a breathtaking pond. The sun was just about set and you could tell that the moon and stars would be out in full glory.

Turning off the bike, he almost didn’t want to get off just due to the fact Kaeli would have to take her hands off of him. Stepping off the bike and removing his helmet he hung it on the handle. Kaeli undid the strap under her chin and pulled the helmet off, her blonde hair falling out gently and resting just below her shoulders. Just like when he dropped her off a few nights before Zen lifted the petite woman off of the bike and gently placed her feet on the ground but this time he didn’t let her go.

The two held a gentle gaze, staring directly into each others eyes. Kaeli could see her bright blue eyes reflected in Zen’s ruby red eyes, and Zen could see his ruby red eyes reflected in Kaeli’s bright blue eyes. In turn the two were seeing purple.

Kaeli broke the gaze to look out toward the gorgeous scene laid out before them. The pond had light ripples due to the gentle breeze and as the moon and the stars came out they were being softly reflected in the water.

“Zen this is beautiful. Is this a place you come to often?”

“Oh, I’ve been here a couple times. Just when I needed to clear my thoughts.”

He couldn’t stop staring at her.

His hands were still settled on her waist but she had lifted her grip on his forearms so she could rub her arms to keep warm.

“Oh Jagiya, here.” The white haired prince took his jacket off and laid it across her shoulders.

“Jagiya?” Kaeli tilted her head and gave him a puzzled look. Then she looked away from him and back out towards the view.

Oh no. Was that too formal? Zen’s cheeks were burning. He was about to apologize when Kaeli spoke up.

“…No one has ever called me that before. Well at least not anyone that mattered.” She looked back at the handsome musical actor. “I like it.”

A strong hand had gripped hers tight and long fingers intertwined with her own. Zen led her to the base of the pond and the two sat in the lush grass with their feet just at edge of the water.

They sat in silence for a good couple of minutes. Holding hands, their palms were almost sweating from the warmth. Zen broke the silence this time.

“So a lot has happened this past couple of days. I didn’t know you would be such a handful, Little Pixie.” Zen laughed and gave her his brightest smile.

Kaeli couldn’t match his energy. She knew there were things she had to tell him, and even if she did, there would still be a lot more that she wouldn’t be able to. She hated that she kept secrets and would have to continue keeping them. Well at least for another couple of days.

“Yes. I guess you learned a good bit about me. I’m sure you’re curious about some things.”

“I’m not going to push you into telling me anything you don’t want to, Jagiya. I understand the kind of life you live. Did you know I used to be in a gang?”

“Sammy did.”

“Well I get it. It’s dangerous and you can never be too careful about who you open up to. But I trust you, Kaeli. And I don’t care if right now you are keeping things from me. We have time to flush everything out. Right now, I just enjoy being in your company.”

Kaeli looked toward Zen and smiled. “I’ll tell you everything I can.”

Samantha was back on the freeway. Rushing past each car like she was gracefully completing an obstacle course on ice skates. She loved the speed and she loved the feeling of leaving all her worries behind her. She hopped off the freeway and drove into town. She new exactly where she was headed. Her sunglasses were resting on top of her head since the sun was setting. Approaching a stop light downtown she pulled up next to another sports car. Their top was down same as her. It was a single person. A man. An older man. The kind of older man she’s been dealing with her whole life it seemed like. The kind she despised. The man looked over at her and leaned back. Laid his wrist on the steering wheel, obviously making sure he flashed his Rolex. He winked at her, and began to rev his engine.

Alright. Kang wants me to act like royalty? He says I’m rebellious? If that’s how they all see me, I’ll make sure I live up to what they envisioned. 

Sam rolled her eyes at the man and pulled her sunglasses down over her eyes. She raised an eyebrow and continuing to stare at him, revved her engine in response. She pressed the CD button on the stereo and hit track number 4. It was a cliché but it was her absolute favorite. Joan Jett - Bad Reputation. She cranked the volume and without waiting for the light to change, charged through the intersection leaving the old pervert far in the rearview mirror. 

Sam pulled into the parking lot of a video arcade. She just wanted to blow off some steam. Some racing games, some shooters, maybe some pinball. However, she forgot that she was in a pencil skirt, a silk camisole, and a pair of stilettos. She had ditched the cardigan somewhere on the freeway. She wanted to feel the wind on her skin. Her hair was still curled but gained massive volume due to driving with the top down. She looked like a sexy librarian or a hot lawyer. Not making the connection to the way she looked and the fact that the place was going to be packed with a bunch of college boys, she carelessly sauntered in the front doors. 

She found her way to an empty machine. A shoot out game. She grabbed the plastic gun and held it in both hands, being cautious of her injury, taking a very familiar stance. You could tell she knew how to handle a gun. First round, every target hit. Second round, every target hit. Sharp focus. She didn’t notice the college boys rubbernecking to catch a glance at her. Tenth round, still every target hit. She had already surpassed the high score. 

A crowd had formed but still in her own head, Sam hadn’t noticed. They were chanting and cheering her on. Making rather icky comments about her. Now Twenty-two rounds in, a timid voice broke her out of her daze.

“Sam? Uhm, Samantha? Is that you?”

She stopped shooting and looked toward the small voice. She was met with blonde hair and big amethyst eyes. “Yoosung?”

“Yeah, It’s me! You remembered my name!”

“Of course I did, silly! Uhm what’s the deal with this sort of half circle deal going on behind me?”

“Oh well, uhm you kind of look like some sexy super spy. So you drew a bit of a crowd.”

Sam looked around at all the college kids gaping at her with their mouths open. Gross. 

“Alright shows over, get out of here ya vultures.”

Yoosung was laughing at the woman who was towering over him. She was already inches taller than him, but in stilettos? She was practically over a foot taller than him. “Sam shouldn’t you take it easy with those sharp shooting skills since you technically are a trained assassin and stuff?”

“Whoa Yoosung. Let’s keep it down, yeah? I know you learned a lot about me the other night but we still have to keep it quiet.” Sam was feeling a little uneasy. It probably wasn’t the best idea to go to an arcade that wasn’t strictly for adults. “Hey Yoosung, you’re of drinking age right?”

“I am!! Why do you ask?” The energetic blonde seemed overly thrilled by her inquiry.

“Do you want to grab a drink with me? There’s a place I think you’d like.” That was a lie. She had no idea if Yoosung would like it or not. She didn’t really know much about him at all. Just that he was fun and he considered them to be friends. She liked that.

The two made there way out of the arcade and through the parking lot to Sam’s porshe.

“Whoa! Sam this is your car?!”

“Oh uhm, yes! It was a gift some time ago. Buckle up!”

Yoosung was thrilled. Sam was driving so fast but she maneuvered the car like a dream! He had his arms in the air and was letting out abrupt “WWOOOOOO!!!” ‘s and OH YEAAAAHHH!!” ‘s.

They pulled up to what seemed to be a normal downtown building. A little bit like an Italian restaurant. 

Samantha opened the front door and Yoosung stuck his head inside. The only thing was a long stairway that went down. 

“Don’t be shy Yoosung! Go ahead!”

Yoosung walked down the stairs and Sam followed right on his heels. He opened the door. It was a Speakeasy. An underground bar that was lively and filled with laughter. Heads turned immediately and Yoosungs heart dropped to his stomach. Oh no. Should he not be here? He began to turn around to make his escape but a hand had pushed him forward. He met the eyes of what seemed like 100 people staring at him. He gulped waiting for what would happen next. 

“SAM!!!!”  The whole place bellowed out the tall brass haired woman’s name.

“Hey everyone! This is my pal Yoosung! He’s an absolute sweetheart and I don’t want any of you messing with him, got it?” She smiled at Yoosung and wrapped an arm around his shoulder. He gave her a sheepish smile and she turned to the crowd. 

“Now where’s my drink, ya filthy animals?!”

Zen had just listened to Kaeli spill her heart out and not once did he interject. 

She had told him about how her and Sam had been best friends since they were 5 years old but they had lived together since senior year when her parents passed away in a plane crash. She explained that Samantha never had a family and was raised by Vanderwood. She explained that Samantha continuously saved her life. 

When it came to Reagan she was vague. She didn’t tell Zen that Reagan had tried to rape her. Or that Samantha almost killed him that night. She told him he was an ex and that he was the one that attacked them and gathered them for Kang-Dae. Just from that fact alone she could tell that a war was being battled inside of Zen. That’s why she left out the other details. She told him that she had to learn the high society life and the ways of an upscale escort. She told him that even though Samantha never admitted it, Kaeli knew Samantha made some sort of deal that made it so Kaeli didn’t have to do a lot worse. Explaining that Sam was an escort and a hired gun. Her background with the agency. How also due to Samantha’s sneaky ways Kaeli got to stop going on high society dates altogether and just handled PR work.

“Kaeli, You have lived a life that I can’t exactly relate to 100%. But when I was living my old life, in and out of gangs, taking care of myself after I ran away from home. I learned a lot about Kang-Dae and all of those circles. You are unbelievably strong and brave. If I could, I would take you away from it all. I am so glad that you’ve had Sam around to protect you.” The white haired prince looked out across the pond. “This is going to sound a little ridiculous but…I’m a little jealous of Sam.”

“Jealous of Sam?”

“Well, yeah. She is the closest person to you. She’s always been there to protect you and…well, I want to be that person.”

Kaeli’s eyes went wide and then they felt hot. Tears were pooling on the bottom of her eyes, resting on her eyelashes. 

“I understand you have a past, I have one too. But-”

“Zen?” She interrupted his sweet words and he looked over at her.

“Can I tell you about right now?”

“Sure, Jagiya.”

“Now I try my best to live a normal life. And I owe a lot of that to Sammy. I still work PR for The Spark Blood Syndicate but honestly, that’s something I won’t easily be able to get out of. I got back into theatre which I love so much. I was thrilled just to be back on stage but then I met you. I was astonished you even talked to me. When I flirted with you I thought I was making a complete ass of myself. But Zen, you treat me like a real person. You don’t baby me like Sam. You don’t act like the tiniest thing will break me. You make me smile, laugh, feel things I haven’t felt in a long time. My chest is warm whenever I’m with you and even when we’re apart I can’t get you out of my head. Riding with you on the back of your bike feels like the most natural thing in the world. I love the rush, the warmth of your back, and how I can feel my heart beat better when my chest is pressed against you. I am so glad you skipped rehearsal and brought me here. I can’t think of anywhere else I would rather be in this moment right now”

A pair of soft lips forcefully crashed against hers. The jacket slipped off of her shoulders but her body temperature didn’t change. There was a fire inside of her. She climbed onto the musical actors lap and returned his kiss. The tears that had pooled in her eyes had now overflowed and were streaming down her cheeks. They pulled away from their kiss and Zen held her face in his hands, wiping her tears with his thumbs from her cheeks.

“Jagiya, I want to be with you. From the day you showed up at the theatre I had never known someone who had flirted with me so genuinely. Who wanted to get to know me because they were interested in me as a person, not just because of my extremely good looks or my acting career. My head is filled with thoughts of you and my heart overflows with good feelings whenever we’re together. I want you to be able to have the life you want. The life you deserve. I promise I’ll do whatever I can in order for you to be happy. And if you want, I hope that you’ll be happy…with me.”

She kissed his lips softly and lingered as long as she could until gently breaking away. She settled into his lap and laid her head against his chest. He laid his jacket over her like a blanket and wrapped his arms around her. She dozed off shortly after. Exhausted from the tears and the overwhelming amount of happiness she felt. Zen had watched her rising and falling and listening to her soft breathing. He kissed her forehead and gently shook her awake.

“Come on, Little Pixie. I should get you home.”

“THANK YOU THANK YOU! MY NAME IS YOOSUNG AND I’LL BE HERE…SAM HOW LONG AM I GOING TO BE HERE?”

“UUUUUHHHHH at least another hour or two?”

“AND I’LL BE HERE FOR ANOTHER HOUR OR TWO! YOU HAVE BEEN A WONDERFUL AUDIENCE AND I DO TAKE REQUESTS!”

The highly intoxicated blonde staggered off the small stage dropping the microphone on the floor and making his way to the equally intoxicated friend at a corner booth. 

“Yoosuuuuunnnggg. You have the voice of an ANGEL! You should cover for me at the club sometime.!”

The two were giggling like school girls but as the main room of the speakeasy started to get more and more empty they became very alert of what time it was. 

Samantha could handle her liquor but it had been awhile since she had gotten this drunk. She didn’t get emotional, sick, or angry. She. Got. SLEEPY. 

“Yoosung…we…should probably…call…”

“I’M ON IT!” Yoosung on the other hand wide awake, but also, extremely emotional.

“SAAAAAMMMMM SEVEN ISN’T ANSWERING T_T!!” The boy was whining and it was ear piercing.

“Just keep trying or try someone else. I‘ll make a call.” Sam took her phone out of her bra where she had stashed it and slowly dialed. 

Ringing ringing ringing…”Are you kidding me?”

“Vaannnddyyyyyyyyyy, what’s shaken?”

“Samantha…are you shit faced?”

“whhaaaatttt? Naaahhh I’m just hanging out with Yoosung! We are putting on a concert. They offered us 10 MILLION. How could we refuse?! But uh…I don’t think I can drive us home. We rocked waaayy too hard.”

“Unbelievable. You’re at the speakeasy aren’t you? Keep your ass there. I’ll be there…whenever I get there.”

“Van Man wait!! I brought Lily with me.”

“Fine, I’ll take a cab there and drive Lily back. Idiot.”

Sam hung up the phone and sunk into the booth. In the background she heard Yoosung on the phone, yelling and sobbing at someone. Almost asleep she made out a few words of what he was saying.

“Juummmiiiinnnnn. No one will answer me. Jumin I don’t want to walk home it’s scary!! Samantha’s hurt, she can’t protect me!”

Sam looked at her bandaged hand, oh right. She slowly finished dozing off. “Jumin?” The name slipped from her lips and she was out cold.

30 minutes had passed. Yoosung was being walked out, still sobbing but he had exhausted himself to the point that he was barely awake. Drifting in and out of consciousness herself, Samantha felt her body being lifted into the air. Whoever lifted her did it effortlessly. An arm under her legs and one behind her back. A bridal carry. Vanderwood? No. he wouldn’t be that gentle. He would have thrown her over his shoulder, mumbling how much of a pain in the ass she was. Her eyes still closed she clutched onto the persons broad chest, tilting her face in towards their body, She inhaled softly. That scent. It was familiar and comforting. Enough to sober her up, if only for a second.

“Jumin?”

“You’d be correct.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What exactly for?”

“For…”

Well for making an ass out of herself of course but there was so much more. For getting him involved with her, for complicating their feelings and their emotions. For lying to him, for continuing to lie to him. For constantly acting on her feelings towards him and never following through. It was never clear to her before but it took her being drunk off her ass to realize that she wanted to be with him.

Lost in her thoughts she didn’t answer him. She drifted back to sleep.

The Raven haired Prince of Business watched Driver Kim buckle Yoosung into the back of Jumin’s town car. Vanderwood was in the driver’s seat of the lavender Porsha. He carefully lowered Samantha’s body into the passenger seat, making sure her legs were clear of the door. He looked at her feet. Those shoes could not be comfortable. Not sensible footwear at all. But he had to admit, they looked good. He slipped the stilettos off of her feet and laid them in her lap. Pulling the seatbelt across her body and clicking it firmly. Jumin ran his hand through her hair and caressed her cheek. Samantha opened her eyes and smiled softly, reaching out and touching Jumins cheek in the same manner he was touching hers.

Softly and barely above a whisper she looked at him in the eyes and muttered “Mistah…Trust Fund…Kid…” her hand fell and she was back to sleep.

Jumin Han kissed her forehead  and ran his thumb across her bottom lip. He closed the passenger door and thanked Vanderwood for driving her home. He smiled as he watched the car make it’s way down the street. With his hands in his pockets he made his way to the backseat of the town car.

“Jumin *sob* I don’t know what I would do without you!!!”

“Yoosung,” He patted the young blonde on the shoulder. “Let’s get you home.”

[toomanysinks]

WellSaid aims to make natural-sounding synthetic speech a credible alternative to real humans

Many things are better said than read, but the best voice tech out there seems to be reserved for virtual assistants, not screen readers or automatically generated audiobooks. WellSaid wants to enable any creator to use quality synthetic speech instead of a human voice — perhaps even a synthetic version of themselves.

There’s been a series of major advances in voice synthesis over the last couple years as neural network technology improves on the old highly manual approach. But Google, Apple, and Amazon seem unwilling to make their great voice tech available for anything but chirps from your phone or home hub.

As soon as I heard about WaveNet, and later Tacotron, I tried to contact the team at Google to ask when they’d get to work producing natural-sounding audiobooks for everything on Google Books, or as a part of AMP, or make it an accessibility service, and so on. Never heard back. I considered this a lost opportunity, since there are many out there who need such a service.

So I was pleased to hear that WellSaid is taking on this market, after a fashion anyway. The company is the first to launch from the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) incubator program announced back in 2017. They do take their time!

Allen-backed AI2 incubator aims to connect AI startups with world-class talent

Talk the talk

I talked with the co-founders CEO Matt Hocking and CTO Michael Petrochuk, who explained why they went about creating a whole new system for voice synthesis. The basic problem, they said, is that existing systems not only rely on a lot of human annotation to sound right, but they “sound right” the exact same way every time. You can’t just feed it a few hours of audio and hope it figures out how to inflect questions or pause between list items — much of this stuff has to be spelled out for them. The end result, however, is highly efficient.

“Their goal is to make a small model for cheap [i.e. computationally] that pronounces things the same way every time. It’s this one perfect voice,” said Petrochuk. “We took research like Tacotron and pushed it even further — but we’re not trying to control speech and enforce this arbitrary structure on it.”

“When you think about the human voice, what makes natural, kind of, is the inconsistencies,” said Hocking.

And where better to find inconsistencies than in humans? The team worked with a handful of voice actors to record dozens of hours of audio to feed to the system. There’s no need to annotate the text with “speech markup language” to designate parts of sentences and so on, Petrochuk said: “We discovered how to train off of raw audiobook data, without having to do anything on top of that.”

So WellSaid’s model will often pronounce the same word differently, not because a carefully manicured manual model of language suggested it do so, but because the person whose vocal fingerprint it is imitating did so.

And how does that work, exactly? That question seems to dip into WellSaid’s secret sauce. Their model, like any deep learning system, is taking innumerable inputs into account and producing an output, but it is larger and more far-reaching than other voice synthesis systems. Things like cadence and pronunciation aren’t specified by its overseers but extracted from the audio and modeled in real time. Sounds a bit like magic, but that’s often the case when it comes to bleeding-edge AI research.

It runs on a CPU in real time, not on a GPU cluster somewhere, so it can be done offline as well. This is a feat in itself, since many voice synthesis algorithms are quite resource-heavy.

What matters is that the voice produced can speak any text in a very natural sounding way. Here’s the first bit of an article — alas, not one of mine, which would have employed more mellifluous circumlocutions — read by Google’s WaveNet, then by two of WellSaid’s voices.

The latter two are definitely more natural sounding than the first. On some phrases the voices may be nearly indistinguishable from their originals, but in most cases I feel sure I could pick out the synthetic voice in a few words.

That it’s even close, however, is an accomplishment. And I can certainly say that if I was going to have an article read to my by one of these voices, it would be WellSaid’s. Naturally it can also be tweaked and iterated, or effects applied to further manipulate the sound, as with any voice performance. You did’t think those interviews you hear on NPR are unedited, did you?

The goal at first is to find the creatives whose work would be improved or eased by adding this tool to their toolbox.

“There are a lot of people who have this need,” explained Hocking. “A video producer who doesn’t have the budget to hire a voice actor; someone with a large volume of content that has to be iterated on rapidly; if English is a second language, this opens up a lot of doors; and some people just don’t have a voice for radio.”

It would be nice to be able to add voice with a click rather than just have block text and royalty-free music over a social ad  (think the admen):

I asked about the reception among voice actors, who of course are essentially being asked to train their own replacements. They said that the actors were actually positive about it, thinking of it as something like stock photography for voice; get a premade product for cheap, and if you like it, pay the creator for the real thing. Although they didn’t want to prematurely lock themselves into future business models, they did acknowledge that revenue share with voice actors was a possibility. Payment for virtual representations is something of a new and evolving field.

A closed beta launches today, which you can sign up for at the company’s site. They’re going to be launching with five voices to start, with more voices and options to come as WellSaid’s place in the market becomes clear. Part of that process will almost certainly be inclusion in tools used by the blind or otherwise disabled, as I have been hoping for years.

Sounds familiar

And what comes after that? Making synthetic versions of users’ voices, of course. No brainer! But the two founders cautioned that’s a ways off for several reasons, even though it’s very much a possibility.

“Right now we’re using about 20 hours of data per person, but we see a future where we can get it down to 1 or 2 hours while maintaining a premium lifelike quality to the voice,” said Petrochuk.

“And we can build off existing datasets, like where someone has a back catalog of content,” added Hocking.

The trouble is that the content may not be exactly right for training the deep learning model, which advanced as it is can no doubt be finicky. There are dials and knobs to tweak, of course, but they said that fine-tuning a voice is more a matter of adding corrective speech, perhaps having the voice actor reading a specific script that props up the sounds or cadences that need a boost.

They compared it with directing such an actor rather than adjusting code. You don’t, after all, tell an actor to increase the pauses after commas by 8 percent or 15 milliseconds, whichever is longer. It’s more efficient to demonstrate for them: “say it like this.”

Even so getting the quality just right with limited and imperfect training data is a challenge that will take some serious work if and when the team decides to take it on.

But as some of you may have noticed, there are also some parallels to the unsavory world of “deepfakes.” Download a dozen podcasts or speeches and you’ve got enough material to make a passable replica of someone’s voice, perhaps a public figure. This of course has a worrying synergy with the existing ability to fake video and other imagery.

This is not news to Hocking and Petrochuk. If you work in AI this kind of thing is sort of inevitable.

“This is a super important question and we’ve considered it a lot,” said Petrochuk. “We come from AI2, where the motto is ‘AI for the common good.’ That’s something we really subscribe to, and that differentiates us from our competitors who made Barack Obama voices before they even had an MVP [minimum viable product]. We’re going to watch closely to make sure this isn’t being used negatively, and we’re not launching with the ability to make a custom voice, because that would let anyone create a voice from anyone.”

Active monitoring is just about all anyone with a potentially troubling AI technology can be expected to do — though they are looking at mitigation techniques that could help identify synthetic voices.

With the ongoing emphasis on multimedia presentation of content and advertising rather than written, WellSaid seems poised to make an early play in a growing market. As the product evolves and improves, it’s easy to picture it moving into new, more constrained spaces, like time-shifting apps (instant podcast with 5 voices to choose from!) and even taking over territory currently claimed by voice assistants. Sounds good to me.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/07/wellsaid-aims-to-make-natural-sounding-synthetic-speech-a-credible-alternative-to-real-humans/

[fmservers]

WellSaid aims to make natural-sounding synthetic speech a credible alternative to real humans

Many things are better said than read, but the best voice tech out there seems to be reserved for virtual assistants, not screen readers or automatically generated audiobooks. WellSaid wants to enable any creator to use quality synthetic speech instead of a human voice — perhaps even a synthetic version of themselves.

There’s been a series of major advances in voice synthesis over the last couple years as neural network technology improves on the old highly manual approach. But Google, Apple, and Amazon seem unwilling to make their great voice tech available for anything but chirps from your phone or home hub.

As soon as I heard about WaveNet, and later Tacotron, I tried to contact the team at Google to ask when they’d get to work producing natural-sounding audiobooks for everything on Google Books, or as a part of AMP, or make it an accessibility service, and so on. Never heard back. I considered this a lost opportunity, since there are many out there who need such a service.

So I was pleased to hear that WellSaid is taking on this market, after a fashion anyway. The company is the first to launch from the Allen Institute for AI (AI2) incubator program announced back in 2017. They do take their time!

Allen-backed AI2 incubator aims to connect AI startups with world-class talent

Talk the talk

I talked with the co-founders CEO Matt Hocking and CTO Michael Petrochuk, who explained why they went about creating a whole new system for voice synthesis. The basic problem, they said, is that existing systems not only rely on a lot of human annotation to sound right, but they “sound right” the exact same way every time. You can’t just feed it a few hours of audio and hope it figures out how to inflect questions or pause between list items — much of this stuff has to be spelled out for them. The end result, however, is highly efficient.

“Their goal is to make a small model for cheap [i.e. computationally] that pronounces things the same way every time. It’s this one perfect voice,” said Petrochuk. “We took research like Tacotron and pushed it even further — but we’re not trying to control speech and enforce this arbitrary structure on it.”

“When you think about the human voice, what makes natural, kind of, is the inconsistencies,” said Hocking.

And where better to find inconsistencies than in humans? The team worked with a handful of voice actors to record dozens of hours of audio to feed to the system. There’s no need to annotate the text with “speech markup language” to designate parts of sentences and so on, Petrochuk said: “We discovered how to train off of raw audiobook data, without having to do anything on top of that.”

So WellSaid’s model will often pronounce the same word differently, not because a carefully manicured manual model of language suggested it do so, but because the person whose vocal fingerprint it is imitating did so.

And how does that work, exactly? That question seems to dip into WellSaid’s secret sauce. Their model, like any deep learning system, is taking innumerable inputs into account and producing an output, but it is larger and more far-reaching than other voice synthesis systems. Things like cadence and pronunciation aren’t specified by its overseers but extracted from the audio and modeled in real time. Sounds a bit like magic, but that’s often the case when it comes to bleeding-edge AI research.

It runs on a CPU in real time, not on a GPU cluster somewhere, so it can be done offline as well. This is a feat in itself, since many voice synthesis algorithms are quite resource-heavy.

What matters is that the voice produced can speak any text in a very natural sounding way. Here’s the first bit of an article — alas, not one of mine, which would have employed more mellifluous circumlocutions — read by Google’s WaveNet, then by two of WellSaid’s voices.

The latter two are definitely more natural sounding than the first. On some phrases the voices may be nearly indistinguishable from their originals, but in most cases I feel sure I could pick out the synthetic voice in a few words.

That it’s even close, however, is an accomplishment. And I can certainly say that if I was going to have an article read to my by one of these voices, it would be WellSaid’s. Naturally it can also be tweaked and iterated, or effects applied to further manipulate the sound, as with any voice performance. You did’t think those interviews you hear on NPR are unedited, did you?

The goal at first is to find the creatives whose work would be improved or eased by adding this tool to their toolbox.

“There are a lot of people who have this need,” explained Hocking. “A video producer who doesn’t have the budget to hire a voice actor; someone with a large volume of content that has to be iterated on rapidly; if English is a second language, this opens up a lot of doors; and some people just don’t have a voice for radio.”

It would be nice to be able to add voice with a click rather than just have block text and royalty-free music over a social ad  (think the admen):

I asked about the reception among voice actors, who of course are essentially being asked to train their own replacements. They said that the actors were actually positive about it, thinking of it as something like stock photography for voice; get a premade product for cheap, and if you like it, pay the creator for the real thing. Although they didn’t want to prematurely lock themselves into future business models, they did acknowledge that revenue share with voice actors was a possibility. Payment for virtual representations is something of a new and evolving field.

A closed beta launches today, which you can sign up for at the company’s site. They’re going to be launching with five voices to start, with more voices and options to come as WellSaid’s place in the market becomes clear. Part of that process will almost certainly be inclusion in tools used by the blind or otherwise disabled, as I have been hoping for years.

Sounds familiar

And what comes after that? Making synthetic versions of users’ voices, of course. No brainer! But the two founders cautioned that’s a ways off for several reasons, even though it’s very much a possibility.

“Right now we’re using about 20 hours of data per person, but we see a future where we can get it down to 1 or 2 hours while maintaining a premium lifelike quality to the voice,” said Petrochuk.

“And we can build off existing datasets, like where someone has a back catalog of content,” added Hocking.

The trouble is that the content may not be exactly right for training the deep learning model, which advanced as it is can no doubt be finicky. There are dials and knobs to tweak, of course, but they said that fine-tuning a voice is more a matter of adding corrective speech, perhaps having the voice actor reading a specific script that props up the sounds or cadences that need a boost.

They compared it with directing such an actor rather than adjusting code. You don’t, after all, tell an actor to increase the pauses after commas by 8 percent or 15 milliseconds, whichever is longer. It’s more efficient to demonstrate for them: “say it like this.”

Even so getting the quality just right with limited and imperfect training data is a challenge that will take some serious work if and when the team decides to take it on.

But as some of you may have noticed, there are also some parallels to the unsavory world of “deepfakes.” Download a dozen podcasts or speeches and you’ve got enough material to make a passable replica of someone’s voice, perhaps a public figure. This of course has a worrying synergy with the existing ability to fake video and other imagery.

This is not news to Hocking and Petrochuk. If you work in AI this kind of thing is sort of inevitable.

“This is a super important question and we’ve considered it a lot,” said Petrochuk. “We come from AI2, where the motto is ‘AI for the common good.’ That’s something we really subscribe to, and that differentiates us from our competitors who made Barack Obama voices before they even had an MVP [minimum viable product]. We’re going to watch closely to make sure this isn’t being used negatively, and we’re not launching with the ability to make a custom voice, because that would let anyone create a voice from anyone.”

Active monitoring is just about all anyone with a potentially troubling AI technology can be expected to do — though they are looking at mitigation techniques that could help identify synthetic voices.

With the ongoing emphasis on multimedia presentation of content and advertising rather than written, WellSaid seems poised to make an early play in a growing market. As the product evolves and improves, it’s easy to picture it moving into new, more constrained spaces, like time-shifting apps (instant podcast with 5 voices to choose from!) and even taking over territory currently claimed by voice assistants. Sounds good to me.

Via Devin Coldewey https://techcrunch.com

[brothermarc7theatre]

"The Prince of Egypt" show #678

The story of Moses and Ramses is a tale of Biblically epic proportions. The 1998 animated film not only featured the vocal talents of some of the decade’s most well-known actors, it won an Oscar for its noteworthy anthem, “When You Believe.” Nearly twenty years later, Stephen Schwartz and Philip LaZebnik have adapted The Prince of Egypt for the stage, bringing its world premiere run to TheatreWorks Silicon Valley in Mountain View. The glaringly absent essence of Biblical pathos in the musical is forgivable as both Mr. Schwartz and Mr. LaZebnik have clearly made this story about the brothers. Themes of identity, freedom, and the powerful women supporting and inspiring the male leaders they love come to light in this freshly staged, theatrically fluid production, directed by the ever-capable Scott Schwartz.

(Ensemble of The Prince of Egypt; Photo credit: Kevin Berne)

The director Schwartz has compiled a group of diverse actors to portray the members of the Hebrew slaves and Egyptian royalty. What makes this musical adaptation a triumph in the realm of musical storytelling is Sean Cheesman’s incredible choreography. With the use of only a dozen or so building blocks, Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Cheesman are able to construct thrones, temples, rooms, a fountain, and tombs for the deceased firstborns and a slew of other Middle Eastern amenities without breaking stride. The stage craft and pure showmanship of the locales and talents make this storytelling process an alluring piece of theatre. The diverse cast represents the population very well, making the heroes of Exodus more approachable on stage than on film or even in the Bible story.

(Diluckshan Jeyaratnam (Moses) and Jason Gotay (Ramses), flanked by Cast members; Photo credit: Kevin Berne)

Diluckshan Jeyaratnam is an impeccable Moses, leading the musical, and his people, with a boyish awe that exudes wonder and motivated gravitas. Mr. Jeyaratnam’s timbre flows with Stephen Schwartz’s score extremely well, making “Footprints in the Sand” a charming mantra for the younger prince of Egypt. Mr. Schwartz has done away with plot pushing songs in his score, but rather gives the character a pause in the action so the audience may get to know their deep, dark thoughts, personalizing each role with a musical signature. Mr. Jeyaratnam’s brotherly chemistry opposite Jason Gotay’s Ramses is dynamically sound, matching well in competitive demeanor, unconditional love, and being a pair of voices that sound absolutely heavenly together. Act One’s “The Secret Room” provides the two princes with some wonderful moments of harmony and unison singing, enhanced by Mike Billings’ cinematically grand lighting design. However, in Act Two, the two men team up for a memorable “Always on My Side,” making the brotherly connection the forefront relationship the audience wants to see grow. Mr. Gotay, as an individual, is a purely grand Ramses.  His journey from cautious but daring older brother to the careless, free Moses sees a heart-hardening turn as the burden of becoming Pharaoh takes hold. Both men go through a journey of finding their true identity, realizing that not being a slave doesn’t mean you are free and, ultimately, it takes appreciating those whom they love to live a truly worthy life.

(Brennyn Lark (Tzipporah) and Diluckshan Jeyaratnam (Moses); Photo credit: Kevin Berne)

Christina Sajous delivers a strong performance as Queen Tuya, mother to Ramses and adopted mother to Moses. Miss Sajous’ steadfast presence and empowering vocal turns make her a perfect Queen to Tom Nelis’ brooding Pharaoh Seti. Brennyn Lark is a gorgeous Tzipporah, eventual wife to Moses. Miss Lark dances and sings her way through a heartfelt “Dance to the Day,” which becomes her signature mantra as she tries to escape being a token to Ramses and fulfill her own dreams, and eventual falling in love with Moses. Miss Lark has just enough material to win the hearts of the audience and is a consummate example of how strong Stephen Schwartz and Mr. LaZebnik have written their female roles. Jamila Sabares-Klemm is fine as Ramses' wife, exuding the duty-bound burden in continuing the family lineage of staying with royals. She has the haunting “Heartless” solo in Act Two to show just how deep her feelings go for the land and for Ramses, and sings it superbly.

(Center: Diluckshan Jeyaratnam (Moses), flanked by Julia Motyka (Miriam), David Crane (Aaron), and Brennyn Lark (Tzipporah); Photo credit: Kevin Berne)

Featured standout performances come from Paul-Jordan Jansen’s boisterously fun Jethro, Julia Motyka’s genial Miriam, and David Crane’s hilariously charming Aaron. Mr. Jansen leads the romp, “Through Heaven’s Eyes,” with authoritative gravitas and paternal warmth towards Moses and his daughter, Tzipporah. The ensemble gets a true dance work out in this number as well, executing the percussive and smooth choreography with enthusiasm and deep-seated pride. Miss Motyka leads, and then pairs with Miss Lark in the singing of the Oscar-winning “When You Believe,” which in stage translation still acts as the warm feeling anthem that inspires and resonates with anyone of who holds on to the hope of a miracle, no matter how significant it may be. Finally, Mr. Crane has the bouncy presence needed for Aaron, brother to Miriam and Moses, to make his presence a memorable one. Mr. Crane’s musical pizazz is on full swing in the Act Two opener, “One of Us,” a tune that is altogether rich and possessing of community connectedness.

(Cast members from The Prince of Egypt; Photo credit: Kevin Berne)

Technically, there is little needed to be done to improve the quality of this production. Kevin Depinet’s raked-stage is sized perfectly to handle the dance demands of “Through Heaven’s Eyes” and the spectacular “The Plagues.” Shawn Sagady’s projection design often gets lost in the rumble of the ensemble’s multiple formations and creations of being a chariot, or assisting in the parting of the Red Sea, but are fantastic additions to Mr. Schwartz’s staging when they are the focus. For a musical which is lacking the Biblical pathos most would want, it is clear that the creative and directorial teams have ensured that this …Egypt is structured like a traditional musical and will rely on theatrical creativity to display the miracles and enhance the story through implication rather than actual realization. My biggest praise: this is a not cutesy, diluted musical with Bible characters and lessons that are easy to digest. This is a stalwart production that brings a well-known story to the stage in majestic form, honoring the traditions of a musical theatre production while never losing the heart of believing in the story of two brothers and the power that journey can bring.

Details:

Runs through November 5th

Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts in Mountain View, CA

www.theatreworks.org

[kierancoynea2]

“how did you use media technologies in the construction and research, planning and evaluation stages”

Research and Planning: September

Planning - (post planning phase), Construction Editing and evaluation: April

Media Green Screen Script:

Technology has played a vital role in all aspects of the construction of my short film and ancillary tasks, being my film poster and magazine review page. Throughout the researching, planning, construction, editing and evaluation of my media coursework pieces I have used technology and has played a quintessential role in everything that I do in media. This year I have improved in all aspects in using technology, both becoming much more knowledgeable, efficient, to a more professional standard and using more varied tech.

Construction:

While filming I have used several online cloud based solutions when storing my raw footage and creating rough edits when filming. The cloud storage that I settled with was iCloud, as I was able to store everything seamlessly by simply saving my work to my desktop on either my laptop for on the move, or on my home computer where I would do a majority of my editing later on. The main reason for why I had decided to use Icloud was because of the efficiency and ease of use – being able to use multiple computers and having a synchronised workspace I found fantastic when organising my narrative. This year I have use predominantly all my own technology – such as my own DSLR this one here. I decided to purchase and use the canon 700d as the camera had a large sensor and better low light filming with less noise than the Nikon camcorders at my school. Most importantly, I was able to make full use of the tilting and adjustable screen on my DSLR that allowed me to use a wider range of shots – such as low angle shots, extreme close ups and much more with ease. Additionally, I was able to inject a mod of the canon firmware called “Magic Lantern” that allowed me to have full access to every setting of the camera – from a histogram display to forced higher bitrate recording and fps “overclocking”. All of which I have used in the construction of my film. Additionally, I have used my camera to recreate certain scenes in front of my improvised green screen – taking photographs specifically for my film poster and magazine review page. The use of the histogram I found extremely helpful, as I was able to see if I was overexposed in my shots when filming location shots throughout London as it was an extremely bright day – and conversely when filming in my house at night I was able to identify if I was underexposed and if the shots would be too noisy as a result. Although did have a new camcorder, I still found that I was using my phone to record some of my film – as I could not reach a high enough fps (120 fps to be exact) on my DSLR to be able to film slow motion, something that I used in my introductory shot that enacted as my “hook”. This very much proved to me that we are all prosumers and that technology is almost certainly in the hands off all (democratisation of tech) furthermore – I have found that only to a certain extent does technology seem to be rewarding in that you will only be paying for incremental improvements for an extremely more expensive product. This means that the most expensive might not always be the best, so narrative and purpose is the most important factors to consider when making a film – not what expensive things you are using to create the media. In the words of one of the most successful examples of this, the filmmaker Casey Neistat who stated: “I am not bothered with technology. The pros for using new technology is only 60/40, only providing a 10% improvement to my work, but the 10% is worth it to me”.

With regards to the audio of my short film – I used the music and audio editing software Logic pro 10 to capture my voiceover, using studio microphones to capture my voice for my main protagonist. Moreover, I had used my laptop to present to my voice actor with his lines, characterisation and showing my film its self so that the process was swift and effective. I had also used my iPad to show my actors on set coincidentally my redrafting’s of my current script, shot lists and other extracts that I have already posted on my Tumblr on the move.

There are numerous ways that I have improved from my previous year in the construction of my film. Firstly, I had used all the school’s camcorders, all on automatic settings (point and shoots camera). I had used premiere pro, however was not confident in the software and additionally did not move or back up any of my data in the process of making or editing my film. Last year I had recorded my voiceover in my dining room that gave a bad echo, and was not of a high standard/quality. When filming the outside shots in Spirit Quay, I had also experiences severe wind muffling and this year compensated for this with an external microphone with windscreen muff.  I had also Printed all of my scripting drafts, and sketched my storyboard and and shot lists previously, that made my planning hard to understand and easily misplaced unlike this year.

Photoshop – took photo of the white-millers and doctored the photo, making the image look old.

Editing:

In the editing process of editing my media coursework, I used two main editing softwares: Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro. I had used premier pro for editing my my short film, as I have the most knowledge in the adobe ecosphere. I used Final Cut for the more modular elements of my coursework such as montages and other shorts that could be constructed quicker, as the software is much more simplistic and offers less options but is much faster and intuitive to use. However, I did find it useful in adding my titles for the final parts of my film, as I could place simple titles over my already rendered film – and because of this, could be done on my laptop which was really convenient and therefore an efficient process.

I have use the adobe ecosphere extensively in my second year – using almost all adobe applications in my film and ancillary tasks. There are several instances where I have furthered my competency with technology with the application. This including the overdubbing of diegetic sounds, as one scene shown somewhere around me is constructed completely of post production sound, from the creaking of the steps to the television is all placed after the footage had been shot. The way in which I was able to do this was through several layers of sound that I had modified from gain, panning of the television and so on. One thing I found extremely useful within the Adobe ecosphere was the harmony between other adobe applications. I was able to directly open and edit audio sources from Adobe Audition and export them back into wherever they were exactly in the premiere pro timeline. One example of where I had done this was my “kitchen scene” where I had to overdub my main protagonist with a voice actor, but had to account for real life elements such as echo and the effect of the room. I managed to use adobe audition to increase the bass in my actor’s voice and adjust dynamically the reverb from when he is speaking in the room to when he is speaking with his head inside a fridge – all in order to create a more believable overdub. Overall, I believe I have improved my competency in editing, as I have used much more complex post production techniques in my film. Examples of this range from the use of montage in the opening of my film, compiling differing scenes between each other to create a thick texture to what is happening in the narrative, giving a strong introduction to my short film. The use of an external adobe plugin called the “neatvideo” noise removing application, that I used in scenes where my film was rather dark and as a result produced noise. Other advanced techniques such as the use of ellipsis, timelapse and synchronicity in my shots.

Throughout the year I have also become more acquainted with adobe photoshop, illustrator and adobe lightroom for my photographs that I had taken for my film poster and magazine review page. In Photoshop I have been able to: Manipulate with several effects such as saturation vibrance, and cut out my main protagonist to place in my film poster and magazine review page using the magic wand tool. I also used feathering, the use of an inner stroke to match my desired colour of my background all to create the most professional looking product as possible. Of course make the poster and magazine review page its self

I had also made use of a second monitor this year to edit my short film and media products, as being able to see my products as an audience would next to me I found extremely helpful.

Whereas previously last year I had only used one post production technique of using a “three-way colour corrector” to under saturate my image in order to give an eerie atmosphere, I had also done this this year but have improved in my use of the technique, using only in moderation so that I didn’t lose both verisimilitude and video quality. Last year I had a very simple narrative and timeline and therefore did not need to do as many post production techniques such as the manipulating sound and so on. I had also taken royalty free music and inserted the sound into my film, whereas this year I had researched and composed the music myself on Sibelius using a virtual romantic orchestra in the style of Stravinsky and Shostakovich.