Why a publisher talks about AI music openly
Martinez AI Studios ships music on streaming platforms and inside games. Kaela Inferna — created by Dero Lavigne, published by the label — carries four albums and forty-one tracks of dark electronic pop. CONTRABAND ships a twenty-one track original soundtrack. Hiding the production stack would be convenient marketing; it would also be dishonest. Our tagline — AI-born. Human in message. — is a contract with listeners: generative tools participated; authorship and editorial judgment did not evaporate.
This Studio Log entry explains how we think about vocals, arrangement, mastering, and release identity without using the word “revolutionary” once.
Kaela Inferna as streaming artist and in-game navigator
Kaela is transmedia by design, not accident. On streaming services she is an artist with album arcs — Crown of Fire, Phoenix Era, Digital Rebellion, Aurora Rising. Inside CONTRABAND she is Operations Mode aboard Haven: contracts, threat analysis, crew dynamics. The voice profile, thematic through-line, and lyric concerns (balance, listening, unity versus dominance) are directed by Dero Lavigne across both contexts. Martinez AI Studios handles label presentation, site identity, and coherent press language.
Listeners who discover Kaela through the game and players who discover the game through Spotify should recognize the same ethical spine — even when the mix targets different emotional temperatures.
Vocal pipelines — ElevenLabs and character truth
Character dialogue in published works uses ElevenLabs with per-character voice profiles — tuned for readability in combat, quiet moments, and branching replays. That pipeline is documented on our Technology page and expanded at derolavigne.com. The goal is not synthetic novelty; it is consistent vocal identity across thousands of lines and dozens of scenes without recording booth schedules that would kill an indie timeline.
Music vocals follow parallel rules: timbre choices serve the song’s emotional job; lyrics remain authored; auto-generated filler that contradicts Kaela’s established philosophy gets cut, not shipped because “the model suggested it.”
Composition, arrangement, and the slop threshold
Generative music tools can produce infinite mediocre loops. A label’s job is to reject almost all of them. Dero Lavigne uses AI-assisted composition the way producers have used arpeggiators, sample libraries, and vocoders — as accelerators under taste. Arrangement decisions — when the kick enters, where silence hurts, how chorus two widens — remain human calls. Mastering targets streaming loudness norms without crushing transients that give dark electronic its bite.
We avoid claiming “100% AI album” as a flex. It is not a flex; it is an abdication. Martinez AI Studios would rather ship twelve finished tracks with clear point of view than forty-eight interchangeable mood beds.
OST discipline for CONTRABAND
Game scores must survive repetition. Combat layers need to escalate without annoying on the hundredth encounter. Exploration beds must leave room for dialogue. The CONTRABAND OST — twenty-one originals — maps regions, factions, and Rift tension without treating the player like a passive film audience. Reactive audio hooks in-game follow the same philosophy described on the Music page: music as system feedback, not wallpaper.
Ethics, disclosure, and what we refuse
We do not use stock robot imagery on store pages. We do not claim charts we did not earn. We do not pretend a language model “wrote the game alone.” If press asks whether AI participated, the answer is yes — with human direction named. If listeners ask whether Kaela is “real,” we answer precisely: she is a created artist with real releases and a fictional role inside a published game — both true, neither contradictory when explained with care.
For full toolchain documentation — including music experiments not yet published under the label — see derolavigne.com. For released catalog and soundtrack details, start at kaelainferna.com and martinezaistudios.com/music.