'This ghost town knows my name', a song about streets and ghosts

I consider myself an old-school romantic, and as a result, I have long been very fond of ghost stories—for decades, in fact.

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When I began experimenting with AI-generated music a few months ago, one of the first themes that came to mind was a car ride through a deserted city. It’s not an abstract concept; it’s what I call a "ghost circuit"—my term for revisiting places where, years ago, I used to walk with friends who are now far away. The song explores what I call "ghosts of the living"—indelible memories of people whom you sometimes catch a glimpse of, as if they were still walking through those very streets.

For this track, I used the AI ​​platform suno.com. I asked it to generate a song in English based on that idea, and after a few adjustments and tweaks, the result was: a song titled "This ghost town knows my name." You can listen to it here:

The next step was much more difficult. I wanted to translate this version into Spanish, and I did it all myself, without any AI help. I remember the rules of poetry metrics well from when I studied them in school, and the result was the song "Esta ciudad desierta conoce mi nombre". It's not an exact translation of the English song, but it respects the spirit of the original quite well (the video is in Spanish; you can turn on automatic English subtitles in the player):

The song is a brief reflection on an old dilemma in ghost stories: when we think we see one, are we actually seeing a ghost—or could it be that, from its perspective, we are the ghosts?

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Image: Meta.ai.