By Jorge J. Muñiz Ortiz |
San Juan (EFE).- Puerto Rican Eduardo Cabra, winner of 28 Grammy and Latin Grammy awards, revealed to EFE that he used the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to compose a song for his new album, “Martínez”, with which he bids farewell as a singer to focus on production.
Sitting in his studio “La Casa del Sombrero” in San Juan, Cabra told in the interview that he composed the song “Toco Madera” while “debating” with ChatGPT, one of the eight songs on his new album, which includes collaborations with the Puerto Rican reggaeton singer De La Ghetto, the Dominican Vicente García or the Spanish Rodrigo Cuevas.
“While I was debating, the lyrics were coming out,” explained the 44-year-old artist, who was the musical mastermind of the Calle 13 group for about ten years until its dissolution in 2015 after a concert in Puerto Rico.
The music is at its best
For the opportunity to compose a song with ChatGPT, Cabra assured that this is moving to what he called “the best moment we are experiencing in music at the supply level.”
“You have the digital, the analog, the instrumentalists… It is a mixture of the old with the modern. They are resources”, explained the musician, who in the past eight years has worked as a producer on at least 40 albums.
However, Cabra maintained that artificial intelligence “still has not reached” the production work of a musician, since sometimes mistakenly touching a keyboard or a button can lead to having a unique and different sound from the one sought.
“If you are looking to explore something, letting yourself be carried away by what has happened in music, artificial intelligence can fill your needs,” he said.
“But if you’re looking to break things in music history, there’s a random factor that’s always going to be there. That mistake is going to take you things elsewhere, ”she added.
Musical diversity is needed, says Eduardo Cabra
Cabra affirmed that, at an economic level, the music industry is also at its best moment, although he acknowledged that the competition for an artist to go viral is much more difficult.
“Diversity is needed. I think this is a work of various collaborations. What I am singing or communicating are not ‘mainstream’ themes, along the lines of what is being promoted now, and that is a grain of sand within what I am trying to do in music, ”she reflected.
In addition, he mentioned that currently many people have decided to dedicate themselves to music as a way to earn good money, but forgetting its purpose: to make art.
“Music is an artistic expression and I know that within the arts it is the one that gets the most money, but you can see that they do it for only one reason that is not to communicate a feeling,” lamented Cabra.
His new album, “Martínez”, also includes among the guests the Colombian Elsa y Elmar, the Dominican Letón Pé, the American with a Mexican father and a Dominican mother Ambar Lucid, the Puerto Rican Seba Otero and the Puerto Rican group Yuba-Iré.
Singing was “an experiment”
The album is a musical “coherence” with his previous album, “Cabra” (2021), and marks the beginning of a new stage in which the artist retires as a singer.
“That singing was an experiment. My focus has been production. And I think I already did a ‘check’ (mark) of what I needed to do or wanted for myself. It’s enough,” she maintained.
“Besides, one is in about twenty things all the time, with productions that come here. This stage of singing takes up a lot of time in your life. It is an incredible thing, ”admitted the musician, who also confessed that singing is heard“ very rare ”because his voice is“ very rare ”.
Rare was also his proposal to release the singles from his new album almost daily during the past two weeks, and whose eighth and last song will be published together with the album this Friday.
This decision to release the songs “quickly” was made, as he said, “to lower that emotional charge” that is usually put on releases.