Handling an artist credit that treats instrument as artist

MusicBrainz Style
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I’m conflicted on how to enter this “ft. cat” credit on a sequencer track. The track uses MeowSynth as the lead and treats the “cat” as the vocalist. In the original YouTube upload, the cat is labelled the “lead singer”.

This seems to stem from how Vocaloids and other vocal synths are treated as their own artists; @aerozol previously pointed out a similar situation with TTS:

I think keeping the credit is important for artist intent, but I’m not sure if the cat is an artist in the same vein. What would be the best way to handle this credit?

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An actual cat (or other animal) on a track should probably be an artist - a cat synth is a bit stranger though. How similar is this to vocaloids? I’m a bit ignorant about those to be honest.

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I’d probably credit the track to the AZALI entity and set the credited-as text to “AZALI ft. cat”.

I’m in the software-isn’t-people camp, but I suspect some editors would prefer creating an “MeowSynth” entity and assigning a featured artist credit to it.

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If MeowSynth is treated as a “character” I personally don’t see a problem with adding an artist. We have a few characters in the database and it seems to work fine and is convenient to browse.

Of course, whether this particular software is a “character” or a “tool” or “instrument” is a hazy line that comes down to personal interpretation as well as the artist intent of the humans involved. Good luck :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’d credit MeowSynth as a character, and put Credited as “cat”. Software get personified all the time, and it seems the closest to the artist intent.

I have credited a few AI services as vocalists too, so this is close enough.

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We had a discussion on discord about this, and I was told I should add this instrument as an artist.

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BTW

https://musicbrainz.org/tag/instrument%20as%20artist

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I’d probably create MeowSynth as an “other” artist, unless there’s a character that I’m not aware of there, similar to the guitar example above (full disclosure, I was the one who recommended the guitar solution above). I suppose I wouldn’t be opposed to a character tho

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MeowSynth synthesizes a meow sample from the creator’s cat, while Vocaloid synthesizes vocal samples from a voice actor. I brought up Vocaloids since the track artist is using the cat as a personified vocalist (I guess the meow is a vocal) like how Vocaloid characters are personified voice banks.

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This is what I would usually do too but since there is a cat technically tied to the instrument, I feel the cat credit has to refer to something.

Would it be too far removed to directly credit the cat?

Edit: Considering how we shouldn’t credit AI voices to the real artists, I’m not sure if a direct cat credit in place of the synth would work.

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I think in this case it might be (or at least I wouldn’t, since there’s no “direct” involvement of the cat), but I will note it’s not unheard of to credit animals for vocals. there’s many examples in the type=animal tag, and there are at least two metal bands Hatebeak and Caninus who have animal vocalists (a parrot and two dogs, respectively)

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