"It's - songs that don't work sound off-key, even when they're sung technically perfectly. Or, like, there's something missing, usually a rhythm - like, there's a difference between a recording and someone playing improv jazz? Or, like, something machined and something handmade - I guess proper knacks, there's something wiggly to them? Places where your voice wavered or where you got a bit too into it, or where you forgot a word and substituted something else - there's a level of refinement that knacks need, which's why practice still helps, but there's also a huge amount of being good at improv - which is also practice, I've never met someone born talented at that. I don't know if I could write a book on what's good improv and what's bad improv, and I don't know similarly if I can break down good knacks and bad knacks..."

"Huh. I still think I can make Canticum work but it might be time consuming."

"Some level of randomness might substitute?"

"Yeah, it's got a rand seed in there and will start playing with it soon."

"Hopefully that'll be plenty."

"I'm probably going to keep fucking with it whenever I don't have more parts, though, just to get it knackier, bootstrap it as much as can be. Are there other songs it should know to experiment with, it's going to keep at it all night."

"Hm... I can share all my more easily tested stuff, but I'm wondering if it'd help to write something specifically for it..."

"Should I make it read sheet music or will you demo again?"

"I can demo again, no problem."

"Eventually I want it to be able to write its own but it'll probably go faster with a lot of help in the early stages."

"Yeah, that sounds good."

"How long does it take you to write a song? ...could a song help it develop its singing ability faster? It could sing to itself and bootstrap from there."

"Really depends on if I have any closely related songs and how fast I get inspiration - it's been anywhere from a day to long enough I gave up after a few months. And... Maybe? There's traditional lullabies you change up in certain patterns that're supposed to help babies grow and be healthy but I dunno if those work, but that sounds like a similar concept... I guess for that you'd either want a growing song or a being good at a task song, though - you can sing to make people better at things, and you can get weird feedbacks singing to make someone a better singer, but those skills are temporary. Maybe I could combine them, though, write a song for learning to sing and make knacks..."

"It's not like it'll get tired of singing it, though I guess it'd interfere with itself if it tried to test another song at the same time."

"Yeah, I dunno how effective giving it like two speakers would be?"

"Does nonlyrical music do stuff, that'd be how you'd know if doubling up on songs could work..."

"Yeah. Instruments are a bit different from voice - harder to fine tune effects, mostly? And tend to do more general stuff."

"General? Like -?"

"Hm, so, I'd expect you could get an instrumental thing to make you energetic and awake and more perceptive, but if you wanted, like, to be briefly really awesome at parkour specifically, you'd want a song with vocals? And there's gradations between that, and instrumental's better at stuff like 'energetic' so it's worth it to have most songs be both instruments and voice? I'm unsure what happens if you play an instrument that produces words, though..."

"I dunno if Canticum counts, I'm not really playing it."

"Yeah - I dunno where the instrument threshold is."

"I would appreciate any training data songs you'd care to provide it. I don't even have to be there."

"I can do my whole repertoire with a bit of prep, and start working on new tweaks tonight."

"Thanks!"

"No problem."