When Fiction Finds Its Voice
When Fiction Finds Its Voice
The Blackrain Session: An Experiment in Literature, Music, and Artificial Intelligence
I thought I knew my characters. After all, I had invented them. I knew their histories, their obsessions, their weaknesses, and the peculiar ways they dealt with the world. I had spent countless hours deciding what they would say, how they would behave, and what might happen when their lives collided. Then I found myself wondering what would happen if I let them sing. Not songs about the novel, not a soundtrack for particular scenes, and certainly not a musical retelling of The Seven Magnificent Dwarfs. I wanted to give the characters an opportunity to express their personalities through music, independently of the story in which they existed. That question became the starting point for The Blackrain Session.
When writing a novel, an author decides what characters do, what they say, and sometimes even what they believe. But fictional personalities, like real ones, are not defined exclusively by their actions. There is often a considerable distance between who someone is, who they believe themselves to be, and who they would like others to see. A ruthless individual may consider himself perfectly reasonable. A ridiculous character may possess an unshakable sense of dignity. Someone who appears powerful may secretly fear losing control. These contradictions are part of what makes a personality interesting, and I wondered whether music could offer another way of exploring them. Not necessarily by revealing hidden truths, but by allowing the characters to present their own versions of themselves. After all, when people tell us about their lives, they rarely provide objective accounts. Pride, memory, desire, and self-deception inevitably shape their stories. Why should fictional characters behave differently?
Music possesses an expressive immediacy that literature can evoke but cannot reproduce directly. A voice can suggest arrogance before a single word is understood. A rhythm can convey impatience, confidence, or uncertainty. An instrumental phrase can communicate tenderness or menace without explaining either. I began approaching each character with a simple question: If this person could express themselves through music, what would that music sound like? I wasn't looking for a consistent genre. The characters of The Seven Magnificent Dwarfs inhabit the same fictional universe, but their personalities could hardly be more different. Some seemed to demand intimacy, others overwhelming energy. Some required elegance, others irreverence, and a few appeared incapable of expressing themselves without making an extraordinary amount of noise. Giving them a uniform musical identity would have defeated the purpose. Their differences were precisely what I wanted to explore.
The project also offered an opportunity to experiment with generative artificial intelligence. For each character, I established a musical identity, a vocal personality, an atmosphere, and a series of themes drawn from the novel. I then used AI music generation to develop original compositions, lyrics, and performances. What interested me wasn't simply the technology's ability to produce convincing music, but what might happen if I allowed it some freedom to interpret fictional personalities rather than requiring it to reproduce every detail of my intentions. The results were often surprising. Some characters acquired unexpected nuances, others exaggerated their importance or presented themselves in a considerably more flattering light than the novel might justify. Occasionally, the AI introduced ideas I had never considered. I could have corrected every departure from my original expectations, but I gradually realized that doing so would undermine the experiment itself. I had created the fictional world and established the artistic direction; the generative system had contributed its own musical and lyrical interpretations. The occasional imperfections, exaggerations, and unexpected departures became part of the project's identity.
At first, I wasn't entirely sure how to define what was emerging. It wasn't a conventional soundtrack, since the songs weren't designed to accompany particular scenes or chapters. Nor was it a traditional musical, with characters singing their way through a continuous dramatic narrative. A concept album came closer, although even that description seemed slightly incomplete. Eventually, I began thinking of the collection as a series of musical self-portraits, each performed from the perspective of a fictional character. The songs don't follow the novel's chronology, and they make no attempt to reconstruct its plot. Instead, they offer glimpses of individual personalities: their ambitions, frustrations, obsessions, contradictions, and sometimes their remarkable capacity for self-deception. Readers familiar with The Seven Magnificent Dwarfs may recognize the people behind these performances, while those encountering them for the first time can simply enjoy the music and perhaps become curious about the strange world these voices inhabit.
I decided to bring the recordings together under the title The Blackrain Session, with GNOME RECORDS as the project's fictional record label. The name connects the collection to Blackrain Estate, one of the central locations in the novel, while giving the music an identity of its own. The songs will be available through my personal blog and the 7MD Archive, where visitors will be able to listen to them and download them for free. I also intend to introduce the recordings individually, discussing the characters who inspired them, the reasons behind their musical identities, and some of the unexpected results of the creative process.
I don't consider generating music through artificial intelligence equivalent to writing, arranging, and recording it with human musicians. These are different creative processes, each with its own possibilities and limitations. What fascinates me is the opportunity to take fictional personalities developed through years of writing and explore them through another artistic language. The technology is not the subject of the project, nor is it an end in itself. It is a means of experimentation, a way to discover whether the characters I imagined on the page might acquire an unexpected dimension when interpreted through music.
Perhaps the most rewarding aspect of the experience has been discovering new ways of looking at characters I thought I understood completely. Some interpretations made me laugh, others felt unexpectedly appropriate, and a few were so surprising that I found myself reconsidering my original expectations. That, to me, is one of the pleasures of creative experimentation: allowing something unfamiliar to emerge from material you believed you knew intimately.
The Blackrain Session began as a simple question about what my characters might sound like if they could sing. It became an exploration of how literature, music, and artificial intelligence can interact without requiring one medium to imitate another. I don't know whether the result should ultimately be called a concept album, a musical experiment, or an unusual extension of a novel. Perhaps it doesn't need a precise definition.
After spending so much time putting words into my characters' mouths, I wanted to hear what might happen if I gave them a little freedom. And this time, I wasn't particularly interested in having the last word.
Andrea Bigiarini
The Blackrain Session — Coming Soon
Every character has a voice. Every voice has a story.