How Things Are Made - The O.H.M. Process

O.H.M. uses AI-assisted tools for visual development, artwork, video title pages, editing support, project organisation and written presentation. The music itself — the compositions, songs, performances, musical ideas, titles, concepts and artistic direction — comes from Justin James. AI is used as a tool to help present and organise the work, not as a replacement for musical authorship.

O.H.M. — Ordinary Human Musician — is built around music first.

The compositions, songs, sketches, piano works, ensemble pieces and satirical ideas begin with me: at the piano, in notation, in recordings, in lyric drafts, in old notebooks, in voice notes, and in years of accumulated musical work. Some pieces are serious. Some are comic. Some are strange. Some sit somewhere between grief and absurdity, which is probably where a lot of honest human life sits.

AI does not compose my music for me.

It does not decide what the piece is about. It does not replace the piano, the ear, the harmonic instinct, the phrasing, the lived experience, the musical memory, or the years of work behind the catalogue.

The music comes first. I compose and arrange every single note, word or phrase of every part. I do whatever it takes to get it to where I believe it has merit.

AI is a part of the presentation ecosystem. It helps me develop images, video title pages, fictional settings, visual satire, explanatory material, blog drafts, organisational systems and sometimes ways of describing what already exists. It is a tool in the workshop — not the composer in the room.

The Music Process

Most pieces begin with an instinct.

Sometimes that might be a musical phrase. Sometimes it is a mood. Sometimes it's a title. Sometimes it is a situation, a joke, a memory, or a human feeling I can’t quite explain in ordinary language.

A piece like Not For Sale, for example, is a programmatic work for piano and string ensemble. It tells the story of a family under financial pressure, trying to hold onto stability, security and shared purpose. The image of a house for sale is part of the surface story, but the heart of the piece is not real estate. It is family unity. It is the question of what can and cannot be bought. It is about what remains valuable when circumstances become frightening.

That is usually how I work. The title is rarely just a label. It is a doorway into the piece.

From there, I work musically. I shape motifs, phrases, structures, textures, voicing, pacing, and emotional direction. If it is piano music, the hand, the instrument and the ear all argue with each other until something feels true. If it involves strings or ensemble writing, I think about colour, density, register, weight and movement. I draw from decades of experience.

The piece has to earn its own existence.

What AI Is Used For

AI is used here mainly as a visual, editorial and organisational assistant.

It may help create:

Video title pages. For YouTube, website presentation, or project identity.

MP3 covers and art work. To give each piece a visual atmosphere.

Satirical images. For the Algorithm Hitz universe and related fictional bands, ads and news segments.

Blog drafts and explanatory text. Which I then shape, correct, approve or reject.

Project organisation. Including cataloguing, descriptions, release planning, disclaimers, metadata thinking and structure.

What AI does well is accelerate the visualisation of an idea. If I describe a moody house at dusk with a “For Sale” sign, a family sitting together and the title Not For Sale, it can help me turn that idea into a usable visual direction. That saves time and lets me build a coherent world around the music.

But the judgement remains human. I decide whether the image is right. I decide whether the tone is wrong. I decide whether something is too glossy, too fake, too sentimental, too ridiculous, not ridiculous enough, or simply not O.H.M.

AI generates options. I curate, direct, reject, reshape and integrate.

What AI Is Not Used For

AI is not the source of the musical authorship.

It is not sitting at the piano.

It is not writing the catalogue.

It is not carrying the decades of experience, grief, humour, discipline, training, family history, performance practice, mistakes, obsessions, disappointments or recoveries that sit underneath the work.

It is not responsible for the musical taste.

It is not responsible for the musical skills I bring through years of classical, jazz and contemporary training.

It is not the emotional witness.

It is not the person who wrote the piece.

That distinction matters.

There is a big difference between using AI to replace the artist and using AI to help an artist finally present a large body of work that would otherwise stay buried under administration, cost, fatigue and technical overload. O.H.M. is very much the second case.

Why I Use It

The honest answer is that I have more music and ideas than I can practically present alone. I had written 200 songs before I knew what to do with them and that was decades ago.

The catalogue is large. There are piano works, ensemble pieces, songs, satirical sketches, educational works, ambient pieces, serious classical works, and odd little entities that seem to have escaped from somewhere between a radio station, a conservatoriumand a reptile enclosure.

Without assistance, the bottleneck is not creativity. It is presentation.

Artwork, video pages, descriptions, metadata, release planning, website material, sync notes, sheet music presentation, social media assets — all of that can become a second full-time job.

AI helps me move the work from private archive to public form. That does not make the work less human. In many ways, it allows the human part to survive the machinery around modern release culture.

Music First, Tools Second

The rule here is simple: The music leads. The tools follow.

If an image does not serve the piece, it goes.

If a draft does not sound right, it is rewritten.

If something feels too artificial, it is pulled back.

If something accidentally reveals the deeper truth of a piece, it stays.

That last part is important. Sometimes the process is surprising. A visual idea or phrase can reflect something I felt but had not yet fully articulated. That does not mean the machine created the feeling. It means the process helped reveal it back to me.

That is not so different from improvising at a piano and hearing where the phrase wants to go. The difference is that now the workshop includes more tools.

The O.H.M. Position

O.H.M. stands for Ordinary Human Musician. That name matters to me.

It is not a claim to being superhuman, algorithmic, branded into oblivion, or polished beyond recognition. It is almost the opposite. It is an attempt to keep the human being visible inside a world that increasingly rewards speed, volume, automation and surface.

The irony is obvious: I use AI tools while calling the project Ordinary Human Musician.

But that is also the point. The question is not whether tools exist. They always have. The question is who is directing them, what they are being used for, and whether the final work still carries human intention.

I use AI tools with both interest and caution. I do not see them as a replacement for human authorship, memory, grief, humour, discipline or musical instinct. I see them as tools that can help an independent artist present a large body of work, composed over a lifetime, more clearly. The aim here is not to remove the human being from the process, but to make the human work more visible.

Here, the intention is human.

The music is human.

The humour is human.

The sadness is human.

The ridiculous crocodiles, hippos and snakes are also, somehow, er, human.