When you’re nap trapped by a newborn you have a lot of time to browse, and something I’ve been exploring again this week is AI music generation.
I researched this a few years ago when things were just getting started and, while Amadeus and others were impressive, the Muzak sounding ditties were nowhere near what you can achieve now.
My friend Andrew Tipp introduced me to Suno, a generative AI startup that can create entire songs, include the vocals. You give it a prompt and a whole fully-fledged song is created for you. Instruments, vocals, structure… You can input your own lyrics or Suno can generate them (it uses ChatGPT under the hood; doesn’t everything?!). The magic is when you start adding your own tags for the style of song you want to create. The results are outstanding; I’ve created songs that I would actually choose to listen to on a drive. That to me is a new level of creation.
The music itself is generated using Suno’s model. If you’ve heard me talk about AI you’ll know I’m slightly uncomfortable about the ethics of AI training data. Where does Suno’s data come from? That isn’t clear, but the fact that you can use tags to refine a song into the style of another artist suggests it could come from a large input of music tagged with metadata, like “acoustic”, “California”, “grime” etc. I created one song with a tag for “Manchester” and you can actually hear the rapper give the city a shoutout at the start! Other times you get random snippets of things you didn’t even ask Suno to create; one of my songs even ends up with the artist cry-laughing at the end?!
There’s a very good article in Rolling Stone magazine about Suno with more background information: https://lnkd.in/eJPbekBB
For me, it’s been a really fun creative tool to quickly unlock some songs I’d probably never have been able to before. Not without a lot of time and music production training, anyway. Is that fair on the musicians who can just pick up a guitar and sing the lyrics they think of? I’m not sure. But I did have to buy more credits than the free 50 a day to be able to produce the final versions…
Judge for yourself and let me know how you get on! My creations are under the name Lucid Shadowman: https://lnkd.in/evtKJuKR. My favourite so far is The Drill; two versions of it created from my lyrics. The first is catchier and sounded like a Lewis Capaldi song https://lnkd.in/egXT-QvR, but I retagged the song with the same lyrics and I prefer this second version https://lnkd.in/e85DYZhY (this is the one with the crying at the end!)
I have a lot of songs organised in various playlists; I’ve even made some children’s songs with my daughter’s help! But I’ve recently pushed the Suno model further than I ever expected by creating some stand-up, too. Hear how AI did at their first open mic comedy night here! https://lnkd.in/eijGvywu
#ai #sunoai #generativeai
Solution Architect
2wAmazing effort Emma, something to be very proud of, esp alongside all of your other achievements this year.