From Frankenstein to Farallon

Two hundred years of machines that learned to sing, and the people who taught them.

• 1816: Mary Shelley begins Frankenstein during the Year Without a Summer
• 1843: Ada Lovelace predicts the Analytical Engine might compose music
• 1939: Bell Labs shows the Voder, built on Homer Dudley’s 1928 vocoder
• 1951: The Ferranti Mark 1 makes the oldest known recording of computer music
• 1957: The Illiac Suite, the first score composed by a computer
• 1961: An IBM mainframe at Bell Labs sings “Daisy Bell”, later echoed by HAL 9000
• 1969: The Archies, a cartoon band, top the Billboard Hot 100 with “Sugar, Sugar”
• 1978: Moog synthesizers, Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” and, in 1983, MIDI
• 1985: Jem and the Holograms and Synergy, the holographic computer
• 1998: Auto-Tune goes audible on Cher’s “Believe”
• 2007: Hatsune Miku, the Vocaloid virtual singer
• 2023: Machine learning helps finish the Beatles’ “Now and Then”
• 2025: Breaking Rust, an AI-generated country artist, tops Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart
• Today: Google DeepMind’s Lyria, Suno, ElevenLabs’ Eleven Music and open-source models such as MusicGen, Stable Audio Open, YuE and ACE-Step

AI and creativity: what the research says

A 2024 Nature Human Behaviour meta-analysis of 106 experiments found human–AI teams gained the most on content creation. A PNAS Nexus study of more than 4 million artworks found text-to-image tools raised artists' output by 25% and favorites per view by about 50%. A Science Advances study found AI ideas made stories more creative, especially for less experienced writers, but also more alike. The U.S. Copyright Office says AI-assisted work is protected where a human decides its expressive elements.

We love both: traditional art and new tools. Farallon is made with generative AI tools under human creative direction: the books, themes, lyrics, arrangements, editing and releases are human-led.