The Allegory of the Cave

Contemporary music generation tools connect music and text through written prompts, opening up new avenues for interrogating literary-inspired musical narrative. The Allegory of the Cave, a programmatic composition for solo violin, explores this dynamic by adapting Plato’s famous allegory into music. The composition is divided into five movements, alternating between being written solely by me and being created with input from Meta Research’s MusicGen. The system is prompted with recordings of two principal themes representing the cave and the outside world, alongside descriptive text derived from the allegory by an LLM, to generate short audio fragments. These are curated, transcribed, and transformed into the second and fourth movements, which are in turn anticipated musically by the surrounding movements. Using an older model with less stylistic consistency resulted in interesting and unexpected yet less refined output, compelling me to move from a curatorial approach to a more actively interpretative role.