Hauntshade aka Richard Hasselt.
“Blending lyrical storytelling with cutting-edge technology, Hauntshade crafts, at times, deeply personal and evocative songs that try to capture the human experience. With every verse and prompt, he shapes melodies that transcend algorithms, trying to keep emotion, originality, and artistic intent at the heart of his work. Through the unique fusion of songwriting and innovation, he tries to redefine the boundaries of modern music—where creativity leads, and technology follows.”
I see AI as a tool to create music with, just like over 30 years ago when MIDI came into music and people started using synthesizers and digital sampled sounds. AI is a tool like any other, and tools don’t do anything by themselves, they need someone to tell them what to do in order to do the job.
I enjoy creating songs that I actually like to listen to myself, I enjoy spending time writing the lyrics and refining my prompts to get as close as possible to what I envisioned when I wrote the lyrics (and prompts). The whole process is not a “click the button” and you have a song. While it is possible to do that with some AI generators, I actually want to try and create quality content. I am not doing this to make money, I’d rather create 20 tracks that are good and enjoyable to listen to, than 300 shitty tracks just to flood the streaming platforms with low effort slop every month.
I try to create original content and not simply copy a band or artist. In fact the AI that I use to create my music with does not allow the use of a bandname or artist name in any prompts whatsoever for that exact reason. I also go through the process of mastering my tracks to improve on the quality.
My music is a blend with influences of metalcore, death metal and industrial metal, that I like to call “Industrial-Tinged Metal”. Overall I don’t like to stick, or limit myself, to a specific genre or style of music and just try to create a track that feels like it fits with the lyrics I write.
PeerTube.
You can watch lyric videos on my PeerTube, you can also find the lyrics to all my music on my Musixmatch page.
Funkwhale.
Listen to my music on my own official Funkwhale: Hauntshade’s Hideout. Funkwhale is a community-driven project that lets you listen and share music and audio within a decentralized, open network. At Hauntshade’s Hideout you can listen to all my music for free, no subscription needed. No third-party analytics. No tracking. No algorithms. No ads!
Donations.
While I provide my music for free on my Funkwhale and PeerTube, the creation, publishing, and hosting is not free. The streaming platforms barely pay anything (Spotify does not payout to smaller artists with low stream numbers and Soundcloud does not pay me at all), it actually costs me more money every month to have my music on those platforms than I make back from people listening to my music. I never started this with the intention of making money, but it would be nice to have the music pay for itself and cover all costs.
If you feel generous and would like to support what i am doing you can use Liberapay.
Blog posts published into the fediverse through ActivityPub.
Follow my main Mastodon here: https://hauntshadesocial.nl/@hauntshade