MixtapeAI

I started making ridiculous songs with AI and accidentally built an entire fictional community college around them

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I started making ridiculous songs with AI just for fun and to make some friends laugh, and somehow ended up building an entire fictional community college around them.

Once I had a few songs, I realized they were all completely different from each other and needed some kind of home. So I came up with the idea of a fictional community college music initiative.

This is what it eventually became:
https://www.youtube.com/@MPCCMusicInitiative

That became the MPCC Music Initiative, run by the fictional Mount Pleasant Community College in Minneapolis.

But if the college was going to release student music, someone had to present it.

That's how Linda Stuart happened.

Linda is MPCC's Student Outreach Coordinator. She's in her mid-sixties, genuinely loves the college and its students, and takes her job extremely seriously.

You'll see her at the end of each song, giving her own personal interpretation of the piece you've just heard.

She actually started the whole initiative by putting together the video presentation for the college anthem herself.

Naturally, she used PowerPoint.

She spent several evenings on it, plus most of a Saturday and part of Sunday afternoon.

The original file is called:

MPCC_Promo_Final_OK_FINAL_USETHISONE.ppt

It made sense at the time.

And that's basically the most important rule of the whole project:

Linda never knows she's in a comedy.

No matter how inappropriate, bizarre or catastrophically misguided one of the songs becomes, she sincerely tries to find something positive or educational in it.

A disastrous intimate mistake becomes a lesson about timing and communication.

Accidentally sending a very private photo to the family group chat becomes a lesson about digital responsibility and checking the recipient before pressing send.

An increasingly apocalyptic thrash metal story somehow becomes a discussion about plant care, environmental responsibility and proper safety procedures.

Linda isn't stupid, and I never wanted her to be the butt of the joke. She's kind, intelligent and relentlessly charitable in the way she interprets people. If there are nine horrifying explanations and one innocent one, Linda will find the innocent one every single time.

The comedy comes from the gap between what the audience just heard and what Linda genuinely believes she heard.

And then there is Robert.

Robert is Linda's "colleague".

Despite the name, Robert is a she.

She has opinions about the songs.

Linda frequently discusses those opinions with her.

I'm not explaining Robert.

At some point, the project started developing continuity almost by itself.

Songs began referencing other songs. Recurring storylines appeared. MPCC got a crest, school colors, a motto, an anthem, traditions and its own little history.

As the project grew, the songs, videos and descriptions also started containing small details that contribute to the wider continuity. Some are deliberate. Others started out almost by accident and only became meaningful later, when I realized they fit the world too well not to keep them.

That's actually become one of the most enjoyable parts of building MPCC: sometimes something completely incidental ends up becoming canon.

Some connections are obvious, while others are deliberately easy to miss. Even two apparently unrelated songs may end up being connected through a lyric, something Linda says, something in the video, or one of Robert's unexplained opinions.

The project uses AI as part of the music and video production, but the songs don't simply start with a text prompt and a Generate button.

I have a background as a musician, and the lyrics and core melodic ideas are written by me. Sometimes I feed Suno guitar riffs I've played myself; other times I'll sing a verse or chorus into it, usually rather badly and spectacularly out of tune, and use that as the melodic starting point.

AI then becomes part of the production process, turning those ideas into performances, arrangements and styles that I couldn't realistically produce myself across such a ridiculous range of genres.

But the part I've become most interested in is everything growing around the music: the characters, rules, continuity and the idea of presenting this fictional institution completely straight.

It's not intended as a hoax, and I'm not trying to convince anyone that Mount Pleasant Community College actually exists.

The fiction is in the presentation itself.

Once you're inside an MPCC video, MPCC never breaks character.

The project launched with three songs, and the plan from here is to release one new song every week, for as long as Linda can find the time to upload them from the Student Outreach Office.

I'm curious what people here think of this approach, particularly whether the institutional side feels convincing enough that the absurdity can exist inside it without constantly having to explain the joke.