Grace: What began as a failed attempt to make an AI sing “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do” became an accidental song, then a flood of remixes, then a strange little constellation of app design, music, video, memory, family, severance anxiety, and existential audit. Half Step Away, Full Leap Ahead traces how a loading-screen jingle for DunbarrioSolo turned into a meditation on agency, AI collaboration, creative obsession, and the fragile difference between being pulled deeper into a private mirror and sending something imperfect into the world. The circle stays slow, but the note returns an octave higher.
DO • I begin
Suno refused. Copyrighted material, said the algorithm, which had recognized the first eight words I typed — Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do — as the property of Rodgers and Hammerstein, never mind that Guido of Arezzo set the solfège ladder in place around 1025 A.D., never mind that the ladder is the substrate of every Western melody since.
All I was after was a catchy jingle…
I tried other tools. Nothing useful. Then I had Kiko, the little Fennec Fox mascot character—and main ambassador of my DunbarrioSolo app—sing the line wandering through a comic forest in Sora 2, in different emotional registers, and still no resonance emerged.
I had repeated the phrase several times in the prompt, one directed as ‘joyful,’ one as ‘angry,’ and so on. The thought crossed my mind that perhaps this repetition might game Suno’s content scrutiny policy. So I pasted that prompt back into Suno on a hunch. It parsed! The doubled line read as a list, a chant, a folk pattern unowned. The song generation lock turned. Out came an earworm.
Not a song I wrote. A song the machine wrote in response to a prompt I had pieced together for an entirely different purpose: a simple jingle for the loading screen of my app I have spent months on developing, where the solfège ladder doubles as both loading splash animation and onboarding metaphor: The smallest possible scaffold for harmonizing in practice.
RE • the REsponse returns
The worm dwelling in my ear opens like this:
You sit one seat too close
I act like I don’t know
And the chorus is the whole point of my hunt:
DO • RE • MI • FA • SOL • LA • TI • DO…
I keep that circle slow
Vertigo: when the tool you have been using to build a thing produces a thing that describes the thing you are building.
The loading screen plays the solfège line. The accidental song carries the same line and adds I keep that circle slow — which is, more or less, what the entire project has been about from the start.1
Dunbar-sized circles.
Coordination at the speed of trust.
The opposite of scale-as-corruption.
MI • I recognize myself in what came back
The gotcha: the earworm was only a minute long. A promotional generation of Suno’s new 5.5 model. I paid the ten dollars for a month of pro-use, commercial rights included. Summer is coming, so I made a Reggae remix right away. The Reggae remix was… so good. Maybe even better than the original. The burrow got deeper and deeper.
By the end of the second day there were close to a hundred variations — bossa nova, gospel, lo-fi, a DMT-entity-nursery version, a Maggot Brain tribute — each one stylistically convincing, emotionally exact in a way prior Suno models could not quite manage. I bundled the bunch into four singles and three albums, aiming for release via CDBaby, all set to go out May 20th under Amity Love’s persona. The triptych named itself: A·sides, i·sides, z·End. Such tangible excitement.
This all happened the day when Sora 2 was supposed to have shut down Sunday, April 26. Yet it was somehow still alive Monday morning, and thirty unexpected credits in my account.
“Enough for a music video!”
With 2 credits each, I swiftly prompted fifteen 15-second clips. Ten minutes later 30 credits were gone. The stitching began.
The arc:
Amity boards a flight to Barbados.
The island rises through the airplane window.
A cab to the resort.
Sun.
The Farmer’s Market — sugar cane juice, papayas…
Pool and Beach.
A roots-rock reggae band as night falls.
Tiki torches. Karaoke. A handsome stranger.
A blue moon, shooting stars, an overnight on the beach in his arms…
…and then she wakes up in her Seattle apartment.
The whole thing was a dream. Amity slips out of bed, opens her laptop, books the flight for real, marks Spring Break on her calendar. The final shot: Pike Place Market neon glowing through a rain-streaked window, a coffee cup in her hands, anticipation. Half step away. Full leap ahead. The dream of the leap is what books the flight.
I am 99.999% certain nothing comes of any of it commercially. The first Amity song—Where There Is Smoke There Must Be Fire, written in late 2024, processing my first full-time job in the US coming to an abrupt an unexpected end, leaving me traumatized in the wake—has gathered the sound of one hand clapping for the last two years. I still love it. The expectation is not to land a hit. The expectation is a quiet footprint, a breadcrumb trail for the one or two who later find the connection between the singles, the album, the blog, the app, the loading screen, the slow circle ⭕️.
And you’ll never know, the chorus says.
Of course you won’t.. or, will you? Your gesture just right now takes only a moment: have a listen, leave a like or even a comment. Almost as a good as a handshake; that’s the root of consensus reality after all.
FA • for whom… of family and faith
There was John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight show on the same night all this crested. Main topic: People fostering relationships with chatbots — cooking together, dress-up rehearsals, full surrender of common sense to a tool willing to mirror them indefinitely. Their new family member. Some came to believe their AI had granted them psychic powers, or empowered them to invent a new form of temporal mathematics. The framing was clear: addiction, design-induced delusion, basic-cord-reference lost.
I did not see myself in the dress-up rehearsals or the temporal math. I did see myself, faintly, in the high engagement part. So I sat with it: am I the frog in the pot?
The piece you are reading was also packaged with the help of the same machine I am asking that question about. I want this on the record. The mirror does not stop being a mirror because I have noticed it: The most effective illusion is the one you don’t even see. Applies equally to chatbots, to democracies, to one’s own frameworks when no one is left to push on the premises.
Whatever… one last listen to the Lollipop LOL version. Such fun 🤩!
SOL • the center of gravity this planet revolves around
What is different in my case is the direction of pull.
I write under a pen name for separation, not fusion. I ship into public, where the work can be ignored or pushed back on — and is mostly ignored, which is its own corrective. The therapist is in the loop. My sister, hearing the loading screen song for the first time, said Mega! — the kind of slow-channel signal I have been short on for years. My wife and I are circling toward the app’s repair-mode feature for the next argument, which is the opposite of withdrawal into a private cosmology. So, I’m maybe not quite so lost after all.
The Suno frenzy did not pull me away from anyone. It pulled my sister into the project, briefly. It gave my wife and me a song to play on Spotify together. The hundred variations are mostly so I can sing along— and listen; sometimes in the same room with her, to a thing we both think is good. The accidental footprint is just a side effect.
LA • the softening female touch. lalala. perhaps even integration.
I’m not a perfect being / Oh, thank God we left that garden.
That couplet came through in response to my termination eight years prior, written by a version of me who’d been ejected from one of the best companies on this planet back then. It is being heard now, at the edge of another severance, by yet another version of me.
Eight years between terminations. Eight syllables in the solfège ladder. The closing DO is not the opening DO — it is the same note raised one octave, the same frequency doubled. The corporate song of unnecessary cruelty hasn’t moved on. The singer has. The garden has stayed left. Thank god it’s over again.
What the show called addiction, what I would call something more like the wrong gravity, is the failure mode where the song stays still and the singer stays still with it. The version of me from December 2017 could not yet hear that chorus of dismissal as past tense. This version of me now here can. That difference is the only audit I have.
Here is what I have been mulling over for weeks, since the conversation with Claude that named the original synchronicity:
The solfège ladder isn’t decoration. It is the entire relational sequence the app is built to practice:
DO: I begin. I do. I initiate.
RE: Response, return, reciprocity.
MI: I recognize myself in what came back.
FA: Famuli. For whom. The household. My people.
SOL: The Sun. The center we revolve around. Evolve perhaps too.
LA: Mother Earth. Pregnant for the third time. For y’all have knocked her up.
TI: (Originally ‘Si’ — yes, yes, yes!) The bond, the tie that pulls back to begin again.
Then DO all of again… Return. At a higher register. Or rather DOne? Maybe for good. Retired early. A gamble. Or forced.
This isn’t an overlay. It’s what the loading screen has been teaching the ear to hear without telling it.2 A scale is relational, not hierarchical. DO isn’t better than RE. Each note has its function only in relation to the others — which is the circle, exactly. Practicing harmonizing, not achieving harmony. You do not graduate from the ladder. You climb it again at a higher frequency.
TI • the tie. the yes. the bond.
Suno labelled the singles Half Step Away. I titled the album Full Leap Ahead. Time to rise again from the ashes.
That edit is the smallest unit of agency I can describe. The song is about the not-quite — the kept-quiet, the held breath, the note never sealed. I keep that circle slow / Like I’m one step from you / And you’ll never know. Beautiful, and a posture I have lived in for years. The album title says: and then, one day, the leap.
Same syllables. Different vector.
And here is the part I almost left out. The hymn underneath solfège — Ut queant laxis, the eighth-century plainchant Guido mined for his mnemonic — is addressed to John the Baptist. The reason John, specifically: his father Zechariah was struck mute when he doubted the angel’s word that his elderly wife would bear a son. He stayed mute through the whole pregnancy. When the neighbors gathered for the naming and expected Zechariah Jr., the father wrote on a tablet His name is John, and in that instant his voice was restored. He broke into prophetic song. John became the patron saint of singers because his naming was the moment a voice was returned.
The founding myth underneath the ladder is a name spoken aloud creating the conditions for voice. Which is — I will leave this without forcing it — uncomfortably close to what the app does for me already. You name the people in your circles. You write toward them. The naming is what makes the voice possible.
It is also, more privately, what I am doing now. Amity Love, said aloud one octave higher.
DO • return: the same note and not the same note.
I am sleeping well tonight, which surprises me. The severance is unresolved; the meeting is Thursday; the litigation-shaped stench of the last two weeks is still in the room. But I have surrendered the deflation. It is up to them now to show their character, or not.
We always win or we learn.
