Tom Windward

Tom Windward

Tom Windward is an virtual singer to bring songs written by Mark van Setten to life. Tom has a versatile tenor voice which best lends itself to more classical songs and ballad.

Mark van Setten

Mark van Setten is the songwriter behind the songs on this website. Growing up, he started playing the organ and at a later time in his life also the piano and Irish whistle. For most of his life, he has been soaking up music, especially the kind with Irish touches like Mary Black, Frances Black, The Black Brothers, Clannad, Moya Brennan, Enya, and Loreena McKennitt. He also enjoys artists like Sarah McLachlan, Alison Krauss, and Secret Garden. As you can see, he mostly loves female singers, though he also appreciates some male artists.

After facing some major health problems just a few months after finishing his PhD, which made it impossible for him to do his regular job, he found solace in songwriting as a way to express himself and as a kind of therapy. He created instrumental demos, for which he also wrote (partial) lyrics. Since he’s not a natural singer (even AI struggles to make his voice sound great), he never managed to turn these instrumental demos and lyrics into full songs.

Then, artificial intelligence came along. In the autumn of 2025, he started playing around with a website called SUNO. This site lets you create music using AI. You can do this by simply typing a description of the song you want and what topic it should be about, and it then turns that prompt into a fully developed song with automatically generated lyrics. This is how many people use and see AI-generated music. However, this is quite different from how Mark uses these AI music generation tools. All the songs on this album have been created by combining the AI music generation tool with lyrics he wrote himself, either using a chord progression he thought would suit the song or one of his instrumental demos. He does use a couple of virtual singers that he defined inside the AI tool. This way, he could use a voice that he thought best suited each song (you can find these virtual artists on this website). It often took many iterations before he was happy with the result. Then, Mark combined various versions, remixed, and mastered all the songs in a digital audio workstation to even better match how he wanted each song to sound.

All this resulted in the songs and releases you can find on this website.