It all began with a song.
Then, little by little, a question emerged: how far can the same emotion travel?
In another language. With another voice. Carried by another rhythm, another culture, another way of breathing the same words.
This is how artificial intelligence entered my creative process: not as the subject of my work, but as one of the means through which I explore it.
I use it. I do not hide it. Nor do I feel the need to apologize for it.
A New Freedom
For a long time, turning a text into a recorded song meant bringing together musicians, an arranger, a studio, equipment and, inevitably, significant financial resources.
Among the barriers separating an imagined song from a produced one, money was for a long time one of the highest.
But there was another, less visible barrier: the freedom to experiment.
To try an arrangement. To get it wrong. To start again. To imagine the same words carried first by an Andalusian guitar, then by Celtic, Slavic, African or South American sounds. To abandon an idea after a few minutes and follow another.
That freedom to experiment was often reserved for those who could afford to be wrong.
Artificial intelligence changed that for me.
It gave me access to a vast territory of musical experimentation.
And it is precisely that territory that interests me.
I am not looking for a song. I am looking for what it can become.
At the origin of each of my songs, there is an emotion, a reflection, a story, sometimes just a few words, or that strange need to express something I do not yet quite know how to name.
Then the search begins.
I can listen to the same song in different forms and discover that the very same words suddenly no longer tell quite the same story.
One interpretation confines them.
Another sets them free.
A third reveals something in my own words that I had not yet heard.
That is probably where the most fascinating part of this adventure lies.
Artificial intelligence reveals paths I might never have imagined.
Some lead nowhere.
Others change the way I hear my own words.
So I listen.
I discard.
I begin again.
I change a text, an intention, a musical direction.
I compare.
And ultimately, I choose.
For me, selection is not a secondary stage of the creative process. It is part of it.
The Human and the Tool
Artificial intelligence can enter my work at different stages: in the dialogue around a text, in its translation or adaptation into another language, in the exploration of an idea, and later in the musical search, the arrangement or the interpretation.
I would rather say this clearly than try to artificially diminish its role.
But it does not know why I began writing a song.
It has not lived through what gave birth to it.
It does not know why one sentence moves me while another, however perfectly written, leaves me untouched.
It can suggest.
It can surprise.
Sometimes it can reveal something I had never imagined.
But it does not decide what I want to say.
And above all, it does not decide what I choose to keep.
That is where I place my responsibility.
I write, I engage, I direct, I choose, and I take responsibility for those choices.
Transparency
I have no reason to hide the use of artificial intelligence in The Laurent B Project.
It has been part of this story from the very beginning.
I also understand the desire to distinguish between different forms of musical creation and to inform the listener.
But transparency should not become a stigma.
There is a fundamental difference between using these technologies to explore a creative work and using them to industrially produce thousands of tracks with no artistic intention, artificially manipulate streams, or divert royalties.
I condemn such practices without ambiguity.
That is not my understanding of artificial intelligence.
And above all, it is not my understanding of creation.
I am not seeking volume.
I am seeking something far more difficult to achieve: the truth of an emotion.
What I Claim as My Own
I do not claim to have played every instrument you hear.
I do not claim to have composed every note generated during this exploration.
Nor do I claim that artificial intelligence played no part in what you are listening to.
That would be absurd.
I claim something else.
At the origin of these songs are my experiences, my reflections, my emotions, and this almost obsessive desire to understand how they can travel across languages, cultures and borders.
Artificial intelligence accompanies me in this exploration.
It contributes to the result.
But what is published under my name is ultimately the result of what I have chosen to seek, pursue, transform, abandon or preserve.
That is what I put my name to.
And perhaps, in the end, there is only one thing I would ask of anyone discovering these songs:
Do not judge an emotion by the tool that helped give it a voice.
Listen to it.
See whether it reaches you.
Because since the beginning of this adventure, beyond languages, beyond rhythms, and now beyond technology, one question has continued to follow me:
Is there a language of souls?
I still do not know the answer.
But song after song, language after language, I continue to search for it.
Laurent B