During the early days of Bengal Institute, when we were brainstorming about initiating and starting everything from scratch; I realised we needed a title music for all the videos that we would publish from the Institute. I went to Luva Nahid Chowdhury asking if she had any suggestion for any music that we can use for this purpose, probably music that is open-source, or royalty free, or owned by the Foundation (since the Foundation itself is a big producer of original music).
Her response was something that I sometimes talk about to inspire others. She said, umm rather than finding something from the archive or the internet, why don’t we make one? You can rather find or recommend musicians or bands, invite them, work with them, and come up with a new tune for your video titles. Yes, it will be a bit expensive, and time consuming, but it would be a much more rewarding creative process.
Nowadays, when I see big corporations with massive budget and fancy agencies using rudimentary generative AI for producing their creative works (which often turns out to be quite ugly), it reminds me of that story. Finding just a few seconds of a title music would have been be a task of about half an hour in the Internet for me. Whereas, we thought of spending days or weeks with musicians to produce one from scratch.
When you have an opportunity—hire an artist, work with them, play with them, give them time and freedom. I can guarantee you, it will be much more rewarding in every possible way; if not, you will at least have some real fun working with a creative team producing something new, which an AI can not deliver. As always, “we do not have time for this” is a lie.
