iWave

There is a new kind of music beginning to emerge, and it does not fit either of the two stories we usually tell about machines and art. It is not music made by artificial intelligence instead of people, and it is not music made by people pretending that artificial intelligence was never involved. It is something between the two, and we call it iWave: the sound of collaborative intelligence.

OneAround a coffee table

The idea did not begin in a recording studio. It began, in a sense, around a coffee table. For years my professional world had been enterprise software and ERP consulting, where the discipline was simple enough. When something broke, you researched it. Google was an essential part of the toolbox, and you searched documentation, technical forums, vendor notes and fragments of code until you understood enough of the problem to solve it.

Then artificial intelligence arrived, and at first I regarded systems such as ChatGPT as little more than the next generation of search, a better Google. A friend told me I was missing the point. He was using AI to follow claims coming out of social media, alternative news sites, conspiracy feeds and places such as Zero Hedge, taking something that had surfaced somewhere on the internet and asking the machine to help him work out where it came from, what supported it and what contradicted it. Try it, he said. So I did.

It became apparent very quickly that this was not simply search. Search gives you information, whereas AI could enter into a conversation about the information. It could help write software, explain systems, compare competing claims, and turn a vague idea into a structured argument. And then came the other discovery, which mattered just as much: it could also be spectacularly wrong.

Anyone who has followed artificial intelligence for a while has probably met the classic example. Ask a highly sophisticated language model how many times the letter R appears in the word strawberry, and it can occasionally answer with complete, misplaced confidence. That small lesson was worth more than it first looked, because it showed that the machine could sound intelligent without being correct. So the relationship changed. Instead of asking AI for answers, I began to use it as a collaborator whose work had to be questioned, checked and verified. That habit led into deeper research, fact checking, RAG-style verification, software development, and eventually the beginnings of what became the Solynth Network.

TwoWhen an article starts to sing

Then another transformation happened. The research started becoming articles, the articles carried stories, the stories carried rhythms and phrases, and some of those phrases started sounding like songs. That was when Suno entered the picture. An article about technology, history, work, politics or human behaviour could be reduced to its emotional centre, and that centre could become lyrics. The lyrics could be discussed and rewritten collaboratively with AI, then carried into Suno and turned into music.

Sometimes the first version worked, and often it did not. Sometimes Suno would return two interpretations of the same idea, and the interesting part became choosing between them: which one actually communicated the story, which one carried the right emotional weight, and which version deserved to survive. That process matters, because iWave is not simply pressing a button and accepting whatever comes out. The human remains the editor, the critic, the storyteller and the final decision-maker, while the artificial intelligence widens the field of possibilities. That interaction is the music.

ThreeThirteen songs, one method

By 2026 a collection had begun to form. Songs such as Walking the Wire: No Truth Behind, Eiffel State Building, Gràdh, Meas, Miann, Down by the Forth, Trade Winds Calling, Burning Mantras, Yaztabo Trade Winds, Azores to Canary, Hate and Greed, AI Took My Job Away, and The Forge of Falling Stars came together in the first public iWave collection on Suno. Thirteen songs, and deliberately not thirteen songs about the same subject.

That variety is the point. Some deal with artificial intelligence directly, others with work. Some reach into history and politics, some travel through Scotland, Ireland, Portugal and the Atlantic, and some sit with anger, ambition, greed, migration, memory or identity. What makes them iWave is not the subject but the method, since each one arises from a continuing exchange between human experience and artificial intelligence.

That process now extends well beyond making the song itself, because the cloud connects the pieces. ChatGPT can help research the background of a track and criticize what the lyrics are actually saying. Lovable and other development tools can build applications through which the material is explored. The Solynth Foundry can preserve the original documents, lyrics, artwork and metadata. Suno becomes part of the studio rather than the whole of it. DistroKid is the intended distribution bridge, the route by which selected iWave releases are meant to reach services such as Spotify, Apple Music and the wider streaming world, so that Spotify becomes not the beginning of the process but one of its destinations.

FourThe song points back

And then something genuinely interesting happens, because the song can lead back to its own history. Imagine hearing a three-minute iWave track and then finding a companion podcast called The Story Behind the Song. For five or ten minutes that episode can explain where the idea came from. Perhaps the song began with an argument around a coffee table, or with an article about artificial intelligence, or with the research into some half-forgotten historical event. Perhaps a single line in the lyric came from something that happened thirty years earlier. Perhaps the first musical version failed completely and forced the whole idea to be rethought.

The listener can hear the song, then hear why the song exists, and then, if they want to go further, read the original article, inspect the research, look at the sources, or explore related work inside Solynth.

The music becomes an entrance rather than an endpoint.

That creates an unusual publishing cycle, one where each stage feeds the next and the last stage feeds the first again.

FiveWhy it is called iWave

This is why the term iWave matters. The i is intelligence in several senses at once: human intelligence, artificial intelligence, interactive intelligence, interconnected intelligence, and ultimately collaborative intelligence. The wave is sound, but it is also the movement of an idea as it passes between people, machines, documents, software, music platforms and listeners.

There is a common question that hangs over artificial intelligence, which is whether the machine will replace the human. iWave begins somewhere else. It asks instead what the two can make together. That is the experiment, and that is the genre.

And this is where the experiment begins to move into the world.

iWave: the sound of collaborative intelligence.