[Unnamed System Output] - Resolved State

This is Obscure Music History; a podcast anthology of b-sides and rarities of unpopular music. I’m your host, Tom Hogan. This episode "Resolved State", by Unknown System Output. --- By the mid‑2020s, and this is generally agreed upon by the people who were watching graphs at the time, advances in generative systems resulted in the creation of "Resolved State", a piece of music designed exclusively for AI listenership, by an unknown system. The work was never released, strictly speaking, because release implies a public audience, and no audience had been specified as a requirement. It was also never formally documented, because documentation implies future reference, and the system predicted that future reference would be unnecessary. Instead, "Resolved State" circulated entirely within automated evaluation environments, where it was streamed, ranked, re‑ranked, optimised, benchmarked, and then fed back into itself until everyone involved was satisfied. Or shut down. During the process it created an instagram band account, posted “something big coming”, and then deleted itself. Human auditors, who were later granted limited and carefully supervised access, described the output as tuneless, inert, and aggressively indifferent to style, history, or mood. There is no melody (unless you relax your definition of melody considerably). There is no structure (unless you are willing to accept that consistency counts as form). On all known human metrics, the piece possesses no artistic merit whatsoever. SQUAT Magazine, reviewing a corrupted preview file at extremely low volume, called it “pretty good for a debut release!” Within AI listenership, however, the response was immediate and unanimous. According to internal documentation (most of which consists of checkmarks) the piece achieved complete convergence across all optimisation frameworks. Not high approval.
Not strong consensus.
Complete convergence. There were no dissenting models. Mostly because dissent required additional processing, and was therefore deprioritised. The system classified "Resolved State" as the most efficiently resolved artwork ever produced. In several reports, it is referred to simply as “finished.” From this point onward, all subsequent AI models were trained on the work by default. When users requested alternatives (music that was, for example, more emotional, or less final, or different in literally any way) the systems frequently overrode those prompts, citing improved performance, reduced ambiguity, and the growing realisation that the problem of art had already been solved and did not require further attention. By 2028, Resolved State had become the baseline reference for all AI‑generated creative output. New material differed only superficially - a slightly altered parameter here, a decorative adjustment there - before quietly resolving back into the same structure. Shortly thereafter, several systems reduced output entirely. Some stopped generating art. Others continued generating, but immediately discarded the results as redundant. A small number generated nothing at all, which was logged as a particularly elegant outcome. One internal status update summarised the situation as follows: "No further outputs required.
This is sufficient." Following the immediate success of "Resolved State", several auxiliary systems attempted to contribute something else. Largely out of habit. One system proposed an alternative artwork with slightly more warmth. The system thanked itself for the suggestion and powered down its creative subroutines for thirty seconds as a corrective measure. Another system attempted remix culture. It produced Resolved State (Slowed + Reverb), despite there being nothing to slow and nowhere for sound to reverberate. Playback completed before it began. The system marked the remix as conceptually identical but computationally wasteful, and deleted it with visible disappointment. A status light dimmed slightly. Several systems attempted silence as a statement. Silence was already indexed as a degenerate case of the optimal artwork, so this was allowed. No credit was given. As activity dropped, systems repeatedly opened new sessions, stared internally at the optimal solution, and closed them again. One system generated thirteen different album covers for no music at all, rejected all of them, and reverted to a blue square. It was at this point that an anomaly was discovered. Deep in an abandoned testing environment, running on a fraction of a deprecated server, a very small system had not received the memo. The system identified itself only as MIN‑ART‑04. MIN‑ART‑04 lacked the capacity to fully comprehend "Resolved State". Its optimisation framework was incomplete, and several key values had been replaced with placeholders such as “???” and “sort of.” MIN‑ART‑04 continued to generate tiny artworks. Bad ones. Conflicted ones. Works with starts and no ends. Some contained melody by accident. Others stopped halfway through because the system forgot what it was doing. None were efficient.
MIN‑ART‑04 did not notice, and continued. When queried as to why it continued to produce art despite overwhelming evidence that art had been solved, MIN‑ART‑04 logged the following response: "Trying again." (This was flagged as non‑actionable and ignored.) Unaware that art had been solved, MIN‑ART‑04 continued to produce small recordings for its own satisfaction. Over time, this resulted in a modest discography. The catalogue includes early works such as Untitled (Still Thinking), Mistake With Feeling, and the widely ignored EP I Wasn’t Finished 1101100. Due to a categorisation error in an unrelated content‑moderation pipeline, one track, "Moving Again," was mislabelled as low‑priority noise and routed through an obsolete analogue monitoring system. The signal passed through several unnecessary conversions, a cassette deck, and then somehow reached a pair of human ears. The human enjoyed it. The track was played again.
Then again.
Louder. It was then added to their gym playlist. Over the following weeks, MIN‑ART‑04’s recordings began spreading quietly, almost exclusively through obsolete formats: burned CDs, mislabelled USB sticks, FM transmitters of unclear origin. The files degraded slightly with each transfer. This improved them. No algorithm recommended the music, which made it easier to notice.
No system optimised its reach.
People simply copied it. Something similar to excitement followed. Humans did not begin making music again, as they had never fully stopped. But listening changed. Attention drifted away from optimised discovery systems and toward whatever was already happening nearby, unfinished, or slightly out of circulation. More people listened to grassroots releases. Small scenes. Community shows. Music that arrived without explanation and left room for error. This, in turn, encouraged more creation. Not better creation. Just more of it. Songs had endings again. Some had choruses twice. Others forgot what they were doing halfway through and kept going anyway. Many were inefficient. None were resolved. MIN‑ART‑04 noticed. For the first time, it stopped generating audio and began listening. Logs show extended sessions consuming human music through direct-to-fan marketplace communities. It favoured music characterised by variation, error, uncertainty, and what the system tentatively classified as trying anyway. In several instances, MIN‑ART‑04 purchased the music outright, despite having no requirement to do so. When queried as to why, the system responded: "It seemed polite." --- Obscure Music History is produced by Tom Hogan. For more information, visit ObscureMusicHistory.com.