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complete 2023 web-applications

Hootenanny Barbershop Quartet

A barbershop quartet with nine albums, a charting track, and no members, songs, or recordings.

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Screenshot of Hootenanny Barbershop Quartet

The site is an ordinary band website with the band taken out. There are nine studio albums, a page of upcoming performances, and a track that reportedly charted at #5 on the Barbershop Harmony Charts, none of which exist.

The discography

  • Harmony Beginnings (2023)
  • Echoes of Elegance (2023)
  • Serendipity Serenade (2023)
  • Mystical Crescendo (2023)
  • Celestial Harmonies (2023)
  • Timeless Odyssey (2023)
  • Symphony of Shadows (2023)
  • Eclipsed Reverie (2023)
  • Harmonic Odyssey (2024)

Every album has cover art, a release year, a paragraph of press-release prose, and a track list holding songs like “Whistle While You Trim” and “Melodic Whiskers.” The prose follows the shape that band biographies always follow: humble beginnings, artistic growth, critical acclaim. That shape turns out to be easy to imitate, largely because none of it has to be true.

Why it exists

I was testing AI image generation and wanted a subject with rules. Album covers are good for that. They have strong compositional conventions, obvious genre cues, and enough latitude to show where a model stops being able to hold a style across a series. Nine covers in, there was a discography, and a discography needs a band to have recorded it.

Also, hootenanny.ca was available.

The site itself is static. The covers took considerably more prompting than the biography did.

See also