Low lex, a musical genre

Years ago, I had seen a post online that talked about using AI to generate infinite shows and movies on your own personal Netflix-like service. This was before ChatGPT, so the idea seemed very, very far away.

Then back in February 2025, I started experimenting with AI-generated music. I would write the lyrics myself, but I would have AI generate the music, so it was more songwriting than "making music".

At the same time, I was fiddling around with LLMs and AI music generation software, and just seeing what it would do when you gave it very strange inputs. Most of the time the music software would spit out garbage. But other times it would spit out stuff that was very interesting. The music sounded like music, but the vocals just sounded like another language. Surprisingly, when I shared it with some people, they actually thought some of the songs were catchy.

I would generate a bunch of songs, and I would just leave them playing in the background to see what came out of it. When I was doing this I was reminded of that infinite video content service and the scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack says, "I just want something I can ignore".

I started generating a lot of songs and using them as a background music playlist initially to filter out the bad ones. Next I built a playlist of the good ones. At some point I started listening to the filtered good ones during work. That's when it hit me that a lot of people who are programmers like me don't listen to music with lyrics because it's distracting. However, this music was different because you could ignore the vocals more easily.

At that point I decided it needed a name and I came up with "Low-lex" for "low, lexical content". Music that sounds like music but doesn't engage the language part of your brain as much so you can just listen to it.

I created a now abandoned YouTube channel for it. I wanted to keep going but at some point the music service I was using determined I was a bot and started just returning songs to me with lyrics that said "this is a fake app... the real app is...". I guess people were reselling this service and I got caught up in the dragnet. Eventually they unbanned me after multiple requests but by the time they did I had moved on.

Maybe I'll try again some day and see how the newer models do on my specially crafted inputs. I had a few interesting techniques that I'm sure are dead now but could be revamped for newer models.