The real potential of tools like Suno isn’t in cranking out radio-ready hits. It’s in creating music that doesn't have commercial incentives to exist. Case in point: Functional Music.
I started using it to generate songs that reinforce emotional regulation strategies -things like grounding, breathwork, staying present. Not instructional tracks, which would be unbearable, but actual songs with lyrics that reflect actual practice and skills.
It started as a way to help me decompress after therapy. I'd listen to a mini-album I made during the drive home. Eventually, I’d catch myself recalling a lyric in stressful moments elsewhere. That was the moment things clicked. The songs weren’t just a way for me to calm down on the way home, they were teaching me real emotional skills I could use in all parts of my life. I wasn’t consciously practicing mindfulness anymore; it was showing up on its own. Since then I’ve been iterating, writing lyrics that reflect emotional-cognitive skills, generating songs with them, and listening while I'm in the car. It's honestly changed my life in a subtle but deep way.
We already have work songs, lullabies, marching music, and religious chants - all music that serves a purpose besides existing to be listened to. Music that exists to teach us ways of interacting is a largely untapped idea.
This is the kind of functional application is what generative music is perfect for. Song can be so much more than listening to terminally romantic lyricists trying to speak to the lowest common denominator. They can teach us to be better versions of ourselves.
zvitiate · 18h ago
Yup. My favorite genre by FAR is baroque. High quality recordings are not as wide as you’d expect, and no one’s really pumping out new baroque. V4.5 is noticeably better, even if the model shows the real “plagiaristic” aspect.
Still, I’m excited about the product. The composer could probably use some chain of thought if it doesn’t already, and plan larger sequences and how they relate to each other. Suno is also probably the most ripe for a functional neurosymbolic model. CPE wrote an algorithm on counterpoint hundreds of years ago!
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/4qul1b/crea... (Note the original site has been taken over, but you can access the original via way back. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a save where the generation demo works…but I swear it did! I used it at the time!)
vunderba · 15h ago
I've mentioned it before on HN, but Sid Meier worked on an application called (appropriately enough) CPU Bach for the 3DO that would algorithmically generate endless contrapuntal music all the way back in 1994.
Amazing idea. I can hardly stand audio books, and some musical updressing might completely change that. Having a beat to it just makes it so much more fun/engaging/digestible/memorable. Kids are already taught their ABCs using songs for that reason. Why stop there, if all sorts of material could easily be put in that form? Honestly it could revolutionize teaching.
yuuu · 13h ago
> we will see something similar to what is shown in Fig. 1–1
nico · 1h ago
Wow, love it, so good!
Etheryte · 6h ago
This is absolutely brilliant. Is there a way for you to put this on Spotify or make the files downloadable? Not familiar with the pricing, capabilities and licensing of Suno, so sorry if this is not possible.
kermatt · 13h ago
This is a brilliant idea. It been a very long time since I wanted to listen to a lecture.
sans_souse · 8h ago
This is great
nico · 1h ago
Huge yes to this
A friend recently made a simple app/site where he can pick the bpm of the music (he likes running listening to 180bpm), then see a bunch of songs and create a quick playlist he can load on Spotify with 1 click and go running
That got me thinking it would be cool to use suno/ai to create activity-specific songs, like songs about/for running or biking, or studying, or working, or painting. Instead of trying to curate popular hit songs to fit the task
jFriedensreich · 1h ago
This is exactly on point. My budget gym plays constant low quality eastern european remakes of US hits that are completely unbearable. I count the days until they switch to AI music that is assumably even cheaper but much more acceptable.
fennecbutt · 15h ago
Yup, give us a tool and we'll use it. I've mostly used it for meme songs.
But I really think they've made a mistake with direction, realistically it should've been trained on tracker files, and build somgs via the method (but generate the vocals,individual instrument sounds for midi, obvs).
I think the quality would be higher since the track can be "rendered" out essentially, but also only then would it be a useful tool for actual musicians, to be able to get a skeleton file (mod, etc) for a song built up that they can then tweak and add a human touch to.
qmmmur · 2h ago
This and other subsequent tales have to be some of the most soulless and depressing misuses of other people’s collective IP. Utterly disparaging to see it applauded.
kelseyfrog · 1h ago
IP is a legal fiction created by capitalists to territorialize creativity.
bsenftner · 5h ago
Have you heard of "Conscious Rap"? It's the practice of creating rap music around the topics one wants to be educated, and then listening to it ambiently. That subgenre has many tendrils, as people with unrealized lyric talent make raps about politics, finance, how to maintain, and developing critical thinking skills and then in the Conscious Rap social media sharing sites their personal music takes off.
cryptonector · 11h ago
Oh. Music I know can play repetitively in my mind, which is annoying at sleep time, so I tend to listen to slow music I am not familiar with at bed time. Suno did generate good such music just now for me, even though it failed miserably to generate music for genres I like during daytime. Fascinating.
janwillemb · 8h ago
I have the same thing, really annoying. I can wake up at night at the same song too. I stopped listening music hours before bedtime, but that doesn't always help and I also tend to forget. I'll try out suno for this purpose. What do you use for prompting, if you want to share?
aspaviento · 8h ago
If it's not too personal, could you share one of those lyrics?
linotype · 18h ago
Would you mind making these available to others?
kelseyfrog · 18h ago
Sure! I "re-mastered" my mini-album with v4.5 since that's more in the spirit of the discussion.
Side note: It feels a little vulnerable to be sharing these. They genuinely helped me through difficult times and I wasn't really expecting anyone else to ever listen to them.
oidar · 17h ago
That's incredibly generous of you. Thanks for sharing.
k1musab1 · 16h ago
Thank you for sharing these, I will try listening on my drive to work.
currydove · 16h ago
These are beautiful. Thank you so much
hndamien · 18h ago
This is a Suno generated Alan Watts inspired meditation. Absolutely agree!
The biggest impact Generative Music had on my life was for wedding skits. Families that wanted a funny song about the bride filled with anecdotes didn't need talent anymore.
The first time I heard it, it was incredible. The 2nd wedding that did it, it started to feel boring. The 3rd time, everyone hated it.
Similar to image-generation, we're getting tired really fast of cookie-cutter art. I don't know how to feel about it.
ignu · 20h ago
AI art is like dreams. I'm amused by my own but never want to hear about anyone else's.
jstummbillig · 16h ago
AI art is like a photoshop drawing. If it's done by someone who sucks, which are most users if the tool is accessible enough, you will just think "That's a bad photoshop drawing". You will recognize the standard tools, the standard brushes, bad masking – all the stuff that is easy to do and that everyone will do.
That's not a tool issue. It just means that working on a raised floor is not the same a being able to reach a higher ceiling.
asar · 19h ago
I love this analogy.
No comments yet
hndamien · 18h ago
Your real poetry on the other
hand, pretty good!
echelon · 16h ago
> AI art is like dreams. I'm amused by my own but never want to hear about anyone else's.
I don't know. Scrolling the Sora image generations feed is pretty fun.
It's got trendy memes, lots of mashups, and cool art. They've also managed to capture social media outrage bait on the platform: conservatives vs. liberals, Christians vs. atheists, and a whole other host of divisive issues that are interspersed throughout the feed. I think they have a social media play in the bag if they pursue it.
It feels like Sora could replace Instagram.
BeFlatXIII · 14h ago
Honestly, this is the kind of anti-AI argument that makes me care. It also acknowledges just why those of us who like it are so passionate.
jbm · 1d ago
I enjoy playing with Suno as a toy to flesh out bits and pieces of creative ideas I have that I cannot complete at my current stage in life.
Weird, stupid things. Writing theme songs for TV shows that don't exist, finding ways to translate song types from
culture A to culture B, BGM for a video game you want to make, a sales song for Shikoku 1889 to sell Iyo railway shares, etc...
Some of us have zero cultural influence and services like Suno mean we aren't listening to the original brainrot (popular music). Sure, you might create garbage but it's your garbage and you aren't stuck waiting for someone to throw you a bone.
I love Suno, it's a rare subscription that is fun.
gs17 · 23h ago
I agree, you can make stupid ideas happen without having to make a huge investment in something you want to hear as a joke. There was a metal song I thought had lyrics that would also work as pop-country and I did quick cover of it on Suno to see if I was right.
I'm pretty sure that I actually could, if I really wanted to, create this cover legitimately and even put it on Spotify with royalties going to the original artists (it seems they have a blanket mechanical license for a lot of works). But it was a "gag" song that probably has a market of just me, so hiring a team of people would be a lot of time and money for 3 minutes of a giggle. I also would have to worry about things like if it's changed too much to be a cover and getting sued for putting in extra effort.
mjr00 · 20h ago
Distribution services like Distrokid, CDBaby, Tunecore etc will handle the mechanical license for covers. As long as you don't change the lyrics or melody, a cover will remain a cover, even if you change a genre from metal to country. The "derivative work" carveout is to protect people from changing the lyrics to e.g. something offensive and the original rights holder being unable to do anything about it.
That being said, your idea isn't original; there's already a flood of automated AI-generated cover songs being pushed onto Spotify, and they + distributors are (allegedly) starting to actively combat this.
gs17 · 20h ago
My "idea" was to get human artists to record it, which is, yes, very unoriginal. I guess that was a bit ambiguous.
riedel · 46m ago
Our daughter's kindergarten has their own generated hymn. The kids love it. In times the teachers rarely have musical skills it compensates for this.
cryptonector · 11h ago
I've cousin who's a song writer who for a brief few hours was very excited with the silly poems she could get an AI to write, and she shared them with the family group. The first one or two were ok, but eventually several of us started pointing out how vacuous the poems seemed, and how sad that she -a great song writer in her own right- was excited about that generative AI crap. She stopped right quick.
I'll say that this "Suno" thing makes good-sounding music to these non-musician ears right here, but trying a few of these I'm starting to notice it seems fake. But that's not very interesting. What's interesting is that they're going to get good enough to get past the phoniness.
> I don't know how to feel about it.
I know how I feel about it: I don't like it one bit.
zamadatix · 4h ago
You say "she stopped right quick" as if telling someone the things they are talking about are vacuous, sad, and crap is supposed to lead to anything else (comments rightly deserved or not). Even when such comments are tempered in delivery it's still no more than a comment saying you said you didn't like it so they stopped involving you in it.
It's personal taste, but this is significantly better than the last couple of fiction books I've read (which were both well reviewed).
I think it's good enough that it's hard to argue is emotionally vacuous, unless you define that to mean 'it was written by a machine'
I think increasing we'll find AIs are extremely good at emotional 'manipulation' (which I mean in the same sense has how a good tearjerker is in some sense emotionally manipulative).
esafak · 19h ago
Feel great: humans value creativity, and novelty.
moralestapia · 23h ago
3 weddings in a couple months, lucky you!
arnaudsm · 23h ago
thanks, early 30s are exhausting haha
bongodongobob · 22h ago
It's probably just the lyrics, not the musical content. Popular music is mostly the same. It's clever lyrics and good meter that's more important imo. You can just dump something in from GPT or use Suno for it, but unless you spend some actual time on lyric composition, it will absolutely be campy as hell.
mjr00 · 20h ago
Suno songs also sound really poor from a technical perspective. The high end of the frequency spectrum is always very washy, reminiscent of the days of 128kbps mp3s. It sounds ok in isolation but it's very noticeable when it's thrown into a playlist of professionally mixed/mastered music.
XenophileJKO · 20h ago
I'm not a pro, but this seems different on the 4.5 model. It seems much crisper.
mjr00 · 20h ago
Yeah 4.5 definitely improves a lot, but I can still hear washiness in the high end. Probably not noticeable to most in isolation or poor audio devices like low-end phone speakers, but would be very noticeable on a good soundsystem in a playlist with professional songs.
pclmulqdq · 11h ago
It still doesn't capture meter or phrase structure well in classical songs, and there are a lot of weird artifacts. It's better than the old models, but there's still a long way to go.
xienze · 18h ago
> The high end of the frequency spectrum is always very washy, reminiscent of the days of 128kbps mp3s.
I have a feeling that’s by design. Firstly for computation purposes, secondly to avoid someone making a studio-quality deepfake song.
cactusplant7374 · 1d ago
I'm sure if you lied and told everyone that you hired someone to create the tune they would like it again.
recursive · 23h ago
I'm not.
nikkwong · 10h ago
The mood here is as notoriously cynical as I would expect from HN. Yeah, let's all brush this tech off as unoriginal, uninspiring and bland. Let's all tell ourselves that music requires that 'special human touch' or audiences will become bored, unimpressed and uninterested.
But I'll bet you anything, the average ear won't care. This music is already as good as what's produceable by humans, and will be available for a fraction of the cost without the licensing fees. Be ready to see it popping up everywhere—in cafes, restaurants, on TV ads, on your next spotify playlist. These soundtracks will become ubiquitous, and these far cries in communities like these will become a marginalized minority just like any technology that's been superseded.
Human generated music will still exist, of course, as the deep emotional ties that humans feel towards others (artists) cannot be replaced by this technology. But, there are massive use cases where that type emotional connection is not necessary (everything i noted prior, but also game & movie soundtracks, in waiting areas, tv shows, etc), where I would place a strong bet that this will eventually become even more commonplace than human generated music.
insin · 9h ago
> but also game & movie soundtracks ... tv shows
I can't begin explain how taken aback I am by this comment, to call others cynical and come out with this - do you think these currently feature the work of anonymous composers of unloved background music?
Have you heard of the likes of Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, Lena Raine, John Williams, Clint Mansell, Ennio Morricone, Ramin Djawadi, Max Richter, holy shit Max Richter, have you never been pierced to your very core by something like On The Nature of Daylight used to perfect effect at an emotional climax in a movie or TV show? The hair on my arms is standing up just thinking about it.
This is the most shallow sampling of a group people who are beloved for their work in these media and likely for lifetimes beyond it.
OJFord · 1h ago
Not GP but no, I haven't. Only one I can name is Jeff Russo, and I suspect that (1) is above average. Off-screen recognition by the average audience goes down fast, how many directors even do you think people can name? What about TV directors?
nikkwong · 9h ago
I'm not saying it's going to replace it fully—the bigger the budget, the more room there could be allotted to artists like the ones you've mentioned. Yes, I enjoy their music with my entirety—Hans Zimmer especially. But on the margin, human artist will definitely be replaced. Think lower budget films/shows/games.
As you get higher up the ladder budget wise, quality wise; I think it's an open question as to what will happen. Working with humans introduces another variable, adds expense, time complexity, and so on. Not every producer, 100% of the time, is going to think this tradeoff is any longer worth it, when they can generate something of similar quality without much effort. Universal has already announced they're doing something similar for script writing. It just seems natural that human-made music is also on the chopping block.
Yes this does sound like the enshittification of everything; and I'm certainly not advocating for this course of events at all. But granted how capitalism works, how the human mind works, it just seems like the direction things are likely to go, given how capable this technology is.
juliag2 · 7h ago
I tried AI music for the first time today and I can definitely see why people say it feels bland, because it does. But most of what's on the radio today feels bland to me too. You're right - I don't really care if the track playing in my favourite cafe is AI-generated or not. You're not supposed to be emotionally invested into background music, it's music for a simple purpose and for most people, AI can fill that purpose as well as a human. Licensing fees is also a great point, human music royalties are complex and expensive, while AI generated music is a monthly subscription at most.
I can't say I fully agree with you on video game/movie soundtracks, but I think AI generated assets will make game development more accessible, especially for solo developers or small teams.
So I'd just say listen to what you like, see where technology leads us. I don't think human creators will be put out of buisiness any time soon, but they might get competition especially in 'functional' music.
nikkwong · 5h ago
Honestly, AI-created music in physical spaces has the potential to be even better than what currently exists. Imagine in real time being able to create a soundtrack that matches the mood and vibe of the current atmosphere. When the crowd is bustling, have the audio match that; tone it down when the night wears on, the people have disbursed. Sometimes you go into a Starbucks late at night in Tokyo and they're blasting Led Zeplin–that's probably not exactly what the audience wants to hear. There is potential, with a slightly dystopian tint to it.
amenhotep · 2h ago
Why would you need to generate the music to get that? Just have an AI DJ.
te_chris · 2h ago
Sounds awful. Truly. Living your whole life in the median. Led Zepplin late at night is exactly what I want to hear in a Starbucks in Tokyo becuse it's surpising, exciting. Get out more.
square_usual · 2h ago
This has been downvoted but I'll heartily second these. Some of my best cafe experiences have been places where the people running it had taste. That meant making good coffee, decorating it well, and of course, playing great music. I've found so many great songs from good cafes. The average yuppie-aesthetic cafe with generic wall art and spotify trending playing is no fun.
NexRebular · 5h ago
"At that moment, Iran said, when I had the TV sound off, I was in a 382 mood; I had just dialed it. So although I heard the emptiness intellectually, I didn’t feel it. My first reaction consisted of being grateful that we could afford a Penfield mood organ. But then I realized how unhealthy it was, sensing the absence of life, not just in this building but everywhere, and not reacting — do you see?"
hresvelgr · 7h ago
> I'll bet you anything, the average ear won't care.
"Don't set out to raze all shrines - you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed."
klabb3 · 1h ago
> The mood here is as notoriously cynical as I would expect from HN. Yeah, let's all brush this tech off as unoriginal, uninspiring and bland.
On the contrary, this comment is peak HN. The reverse take that a machine eating human art and creativity and selling the interpolated derivatives back to you after laundering it from royalties is a common good.
> Let's all tell ourselves that music requires that 'special human touch' or audiences will become bored, unimpressed and uninterested.
Ah those pesky humans, as opposed to corporate subscription-based content farms as the certified non-cynical happy future of music & art.
> This music is already as good as what's produceable by humans
It’s about as good as everything else generated with AI, like say a large code base. If you can’t tell, congrats.
rglullis · 7h ago
> the average ear won't care. (...) will be available for a fraction of the cost without the licensing fees. (...) be ready to see it popping up everywhere
And you wonder why people are cynical? Do you really think that the best answer to solve IP law and the blandness of pop-music is by making it so cheap that we make it available to everyone?
> But, there are massive use cases where that type emotional connection is not necessary (...) game & movie soundtracks, in waiting areas, tv shows
What will be the point of watching a movie or TV show, then? What will be the point of making one?
nikkwong · 5h ago
> And you wonder why people are cynical? Do you really think that the best answer to solve IP law and the blandness of pop-music is by making it so cheap that we make it available to everyone?
Did I say I'm advocating for this future? I'm simply stating an observation, and a likely outcome based on plenty of precedent of similar behavior in industry.
> What will be the point of watching a movie or TV show, then? What will be the point of making one?
I'm sure Michael Bay would consider what he does to be artistic expression; whilst others would say it's a semi-shameless money-grab. Half joking, don't take me too seriously.
rglullis · 3h ago
If you are not advocating for this future and you think this type of material progress is not something that we should take as positive, then you are being as cynical as me or anyone else.
jjmarr · 9h ago
> This music is already as good as what's produceable by humans, and will be available for a fraction of the cost without the licensing fees.
I'm trying to use Suno 3.5 to create low quality 90s/00s-style MIDI music (similar to Vektroid[1]) since that's my favourite genre. Ironically, what it created[2] still doesn't properly evoke the hollow, tinny, low-quality computer-generated sound that I want to hear.
Specifically, it reduced the number of instruments, so the final result still sounded good. It didn't mash a bunch of MIDI instruments together and create something just a little incoherent that implies it was based on something better.
I think humans are better at stealing/remixing other songs and making them deliberately worse.
Tastes will probably change to be into whatever AI is unable to generate effectively and this seems similar to Stable Diffusion's inability to generate ugly people.
Cigarettes are everywhere. Doesn't mean they're good for us. Why do you assume generic background music in every cafe is going to be a good thing? We're just filling our existence up with noise. As for TV and movies, do you think we don't have enough generic "content" already? What benefit is there to making it even easier to make derivative garbage? Perhaps the people currently making it will be out of a job and forced to do better. Could it actually cause an increase in "real" art?
otabdeveloper4 · 9h ago
> Yeah, let's all brush this tech off as unoriginal, uninspiring and bland.
The tech is great, it's the music it produces that's unoriginal, uninspiring and bland.
> Be ready to see it popping up everywhere—in cafes, restaurants, on TV ads, on your next spotify playlist.
So music will become even shittier going forward? Yay tech! Thanks for automating away the act of music listening!
Seriously though, now that music-as-a-product has been killed by techbros, can we go back to music-as-an-act, like before? That would be the silver lining.
signatoremo · 2h ago
I'm sitting in a coffee shop reading this, and notice the music being played. It's pleasant enough that makes it a relaxing experience, but it evokes no emotion, which I don't mind because I'm on HN. I don't know who the composer or the artist is, and I won't be able to recall if I hear it again. How is that different than AI generated music?
Human made music will continue to exist, but for me, just for me, a lot of it doesn't do anything at all and I wouldn't be able to tell if it's by human, let alone knowing the story behind them or the emotional connection the author had when making that piece of music. I'm sure many people who have better ear will be able to differentiate, but many others will not. You may say it's depressing, I call it reality.
srrdev · 1h ago
Excited to see Suno's model advance. We use it for rock vocals (https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Zi0KXpSuQeQ) because nobody in my band can sing. We do all the music and layer the vocals on top from the Suno-generated stems. All things considered, it's been great. We have, however, run through the "range" of rock vocalists. Suno must be under a bit of pressure to generate vocals that don't sound too much like any real singers that themselves are not derivative.
bobajeff · 1d ago
I had not known that this was AI until reading the comments here. I was really enjoying the 'anti-folk big band' station. Now I'm sure that's just a nonsense genre but that nonsense was more enjoyable than the stuff I've found on Spotify. I'm not sure what that says about me or the state of music but I did not expect it to be this capable yet.
drabbiticus · 19h ago
The music that Suno generates as anti-folk is pretty aesthetic, but when you read into what anti-folk is meant to be as a genre, I can't help but feel that an AI algorithm spitting out music and lyrics is pretty far from anti-commercial ethos espoused by the antifolk movement.
moralestapia · 23h ago
Hmm, got interested on listening to that one station due to your comment, but couldn't find it anywhere.
One of Suno's biggest weakness is their lyrics generation, and that you can't generate lyrics without also generating a song. I think it's better to use a different LLM to generate and iterate on lyrics, which you can then pass to Suno in order to generate a final song.
If anyone here has a subscription and they can spare the tokens, I think it would be fun if someone shared a song about Hacker News.
I'm hoping that in the future tools like Suno will allow you to produce / generate songs as projects which you can tweak in greater detail; basically a way of making music by "vibe coding". With 4.0 the annotation capabilities were still a bit limited, and the singer could end up mispronouncing things without any way to fix or specify the correct pronunciation. This blog post mentions that with 4.5 they enhanced prompt interpretations, but it doesn't actually go into any technical details nor does it provide clear examples to get a real sense of the changes.
natdempk · 17h ago
Check out custom mode -- we've added a lyrics writing flow/editor to help create and edit lyrics, as well as Remi, a more unhinged lyrics model.
We can do better on user instruction for sure, duly noted. In my experience a lot of different stuff works (emotions, some musical direction sometimes, describing parts/layers of the track you want to exist, music-production-ish terminology, genres, stuff like intro/outro/chorus), but I think of it more as steering the space of the generated output rather than working 100% of the time. This can go in the style tags or in [brackets] in the lyrics. Definitely makes a difference in the outputs to be more descriptive with 4.5.
whoomp12342 · 23h ago
you can do this... just toggle to "custom" mode on song generation
Jordan-117 · 19h ago
Their biggest weakness is that every voice has a persistent synthy quality, like it's a vocaloid it's being sung into one of those tinny microphone toys for kids. I find Udio has much more natural-sounding vocals.
ojosilva · 7h ago
Udio has these random "halfway" singer voices that I find really interesting to listen to - a little uncanny-valleyish sometimes but interesting nonetheless. Depending on genre it can be a Nat-Sinatra, a Whitney-Dion, etc., it's really cool. It would be great if it could be saved from a song then loaded back for a new one on demand.
idoxer · 23h ago
Another thing I did with LLM which I found very useful, is to give the LLM an existing song lyrics and ask him to do a similar one with different subject I give him
hndamien · 17h ago
This song was produced a long time ago from a verbatim hacker news comment, and got released on Spotify and Apple and became a favorite at home.
Fascinating. I find that song to be unlistenable and something about the thought of anyone enjoying it seems really wrong.
albert_e · 1h ago
A more simpler realization after playing around with the music player on the home page -- being able to skip tracks and sample a large variety of music tracks without any ads in between -- was pleasantly surprising!
Everytime I clicked next I was subsconsciously cringing and expecting an unwelcome and jarring ad to blast through my speakers - and each time releived to actually be greeted by the next music track.
What have we done to ourselves.
It only feels like yesterday that the default was hoarding all your favourite tracks and playing them at will through winamp.
tern · 18h ago
The fact that LLMs compute an average of human culture is more apparent in music AIs than any other medium. You cannot get these things to do anything original, same as with images, designs and creative writing—and it's not an "intelligence" problem.
I'm not sure if this is solvable, but I think it should be a bigger research topic. If anyone knows of any papers on this, I haven't found one yet (not sure what to search for).
juliag2 · 7h ago
This raises deep questions: What even is creativity? How does taste emerge? Is it just the accumulation of your experiences and your genetics, or is there something else to it? If it's just experiences and genetics, AI will probably outpace humans at some point, because these are just very sophisticated patterns. And if it's not, we would have to assume something metaphysical, for which we do not have evidence.
This is a really fascinating topic, and I think it might give us new insight into the human condition. I'm excited to see where this leads us.
velcrobeg · 1h ago
I like this take. if LLMs = average of human culture like tern said, then taste = the ability to create and recognize the above average (and best), right?
can AI recognize what is best? can AI create what is recognized as best?
(you know how vast majority of humans think they are above average drivers?)
I think the problem is the lack of a verifier to check the attempt at creativity in a tight loop. Creativity could just be randomness (off the existing average) plus selection done many times over a 30 year career.
That is, you try something new (random) and you, the human, are also the verifier to see whether that random new thing was subjectively good, and then you select based on that.
In this understanding of creativity, creating a new style is a gradual process of evolution (mutation and selection) where your own brain is a necessary part of carrying out the selection. "Did the new idea (mutation) I just tried make me feel good or not (selection)?"
That activity of you being the verifier is effortless and instant, but the AI fundamentally can't tap into the verification and so it has no ability to do the selection step after randomness, and so it is impossible for creativity to emerge no matter the architecture (unless you somehow create a proxy for a human verifier which seems insanely hard).
The only solution I can see to this is to try to simulate this process, seems possible but hard.
bongodongobob · 18h ago
Any musician will tell you most music isn't original. You just don't have the ear for it. You telling me Green Day's songs are all unique and original? Even jazz uses 6-2-5-1's over and over. Unless you only listen to avante garde prog rock or something, all of music is derivative. And that's ok. Every song being a unique snowflake isn't important. If you like it or it makes you feel something, that's all that matters.
tern · 15h ago
Green Day (was) definitely original. The level of unoriginality I'm talking about goes way beyond "pop music is the same old chords from the 50s" or "the 70s were the golden age and everything since then is derivative."
What's the basis for this? Unfortunately it's hard to describe, but I've listened to a wide variety of popular and niche genres my whole life with a specific eye toward appreciating all the different ways people appreciate music and I know when something feels new.
Even most (or all?) pop music feels new. If it wasn't, I don't think it would be popular. Sure, it's all derivative, but what makes music enjoyable is when it combines influences in a fresh way.
"French house polka" achieved by doing a statistical blend of the two genres just isn't that interesting—it misses so many ways that things are combined by artists—specific details of the texture of the sound, how it's recorded, cultural references, tons of tiny little influences from specific artists and other genres, etc.
I've tried very specific prompts in Suno and it's not even close to useful for someone who knows what they're doing. The image generators are hardly better—things overwhelmingly trend toward a fixed set of specific styles that are well-represented in the training sets.
This critique falls down in certain areas though. Using tools like Suno to come up with songwriting ideas can be fantastic—as long as you have the taste to curate the outputs and feed it into your own creative process. It's also fantastic for creating vocal samples, and I'm sure it'll crush it for functional music (advertisements, certain types of social media) in short order
XenophileJKO · 11h ago
If you think song and image generators can't make creative things, the problem is between the seat and keyboard. It is unfortunately that simple. 4o as an image generator can create out of distribution images because it literally works at a conceptual level.
Suno currently is limited architecturally to in distribution components, so trying to create instruments or vocal styles it never heard won't work. The parts that you can work in are a vast and rich creative space.
otabdeveloper4 · 9h ago
Tell me you don't know the first thing about making pictures or music without telling me you don't know the first thing about making pictures or music.
You just lack imagination, like I said.. there are almost no limits but pixel density and aspect ratio currently.
otabdeveloper4 · 8h ago
You're not making art, you're running prompts through a meme picture generator.
Like I said, you know nothing about making art. (Not a big deal, not everybody needs to.)
In an alternative parallel universe we might have gotten actual AI tools for making art - these would be various infilling plugins, basically. ("Make me a Photoshop brush that paints pine-needle looking spiky things", that sort of thing.)
What we got in this reality is not that, though. Meme making of the sort you posted is not art.
(That said, making memes, especially of the spicy and/or topical kind, is the one niche that generative AI is good at and nails perfectly.)
XenophileJKO · 8h ago
I mean I did have a meme or two in there to show the range. You clearly didn't look at it if you think it is all memes. Maybe think hard about what art really is.. a brush is a brush..
I don't have to justify my art to anyone. The magic is.. you can't choose what is art. You can choose what YOU think is art and that's fine. However you can't dictate to the world what is art.
x0xrx · 1h ago
I agree you don’t have to justify your art. But which was not a meme? I clicked many and found only memes.
thuuuomas · 17h ago
> If you like it or it makes you feel something, that's all that matters.
You’re right!
> Even jazz uses 6-2-5-1's over and over.
You’re not even wrong! I wonder if jazz does anything else besides that?
Velorivox · 17h ago
All books are derivative too, the English ones use the same 26 characters over and over.
marci · 1h ago
The 26 characters with a thousand @font-faces.
bongodongobob · 14h ago
You're intentionally missing the point, but ok.
__loam · 14h ago
I think we should stop research into automating creative labor and study something that actually benefits people.
cdrini · 1d ago
That is a very cool UI; super fun to just hit random and find new niche genres/styles. I'd never heard of klezmer, for example, but such a nice style! I don't know if it's the music, but it's been a while since a website has put this big a grin on my face!
I keep wanting to save some of the songs I hear. Damn, I don't think I would really be able to tell in a blind test that these were AI.
lucasoshiro · 1d ago
> That is a very cool UI;
I really don't like that UI. It's hard to read, and when I found something it slips. Too much form over function
> I keep wanting to save some of the songs I hear.
Just click the title of the song. If you have an account you can add to favorites, download, etc.
cdrini · 1d ago
Ah the title isn't visible on mobile for me!
lucasoshiro · 1d ago
Well, I never used Suno on mobile, perhaps it's that! Here on desktop it's ok
ignoramous · 20h ago
On my 16gigs octa-core Ubuntu box, the UI stutters.
noumenon1111 · 17h ago
If you like klezmer, chances are you'll like Balkan and/or Romani music too
NexRebular · 20h ago
They should make it easier to download the songs. There's so much music that could be used commercially instead of expensive licensing. Someone could even set up a venture to record era-appropriate AI music to a cassette or vinyl and start selling them.
AI has killed my desire to write and make music. It all feels so pointless
I increasingly feel like withdrawing from the internet as well. Half of the users are bots anyway
abhpro · 9h ago
Well there will always be an audience that wants to hear what humans can mechanically pull off
velcrobeg · 1h ago
plot twist: spaceman is a bot
0dayz · 10h ago
Let's put it this way, if you know how to listen to music as a musician then you'll quickly notice how it doesn't sound very good.
So never feel discouraged because of slop.
progbits · 1d ago
Aren't they still in active lawsuit with Sony etc about training on music without license? Yet still releasing new products?
I guess they are hoping for the Uber outcome where they earn enough money during the illegal phase so they can pay some tiny fine and keep going.
ronsor · 1d ago
Illegal? If the record companies were so obviously going to win, they could've obtained a preliminary injunction to stop Suno's business. They didn't, so the service continues.
__loam · 14h ago
Pretty sure napster also continued to operate during ongoing legal actions but I am not a lawyer
brookst · 18h ago
Do most companies just stop releasing product while in legal disputes? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that.
ronsor · 18h ago
They don't unless a judge orders them. It would be nonsensical to do so as lawsuits typically take years.
velcrobeg · 1h ago
lawsuitS with Sony, Universal, and Warner Music, indeed. And the RIAA. and the GEMA.
rwmj · 19h ago
I hope no songwriters have listened to Sony music or they could be in trouble.
pier25 · 1d ago
AFAIK the lawsuit is still ongoing.
Suno admitted to train their models with copyrighted music and are now defending the position that music copyrights and royalties are bad for the future of music.
randyrand · 19h ago
I think it's more straightforward to argue it's transformative fair use.
__loam · 14h ago
Transformative is one of 4 conditions that the court uses to decide if something is fair use. This question is still in active litigation in the courts.
93po · 18h ago
fair use requires it be non-profit which doesnt work for suno
brookst · 18h ago
I don’t think that’s true. Parodies are protected as transformative fair use and plenty of them are for-profit.
93po · 1h ago
you're right it's a grey area, but in the field of music specifically, it's some of the most stringent requirements. the more creative it is, the more it replaces the market for the original, the less of a parody it is (not weird al), the more you will struggle to use fair use as a defense. suno generating music hits all the parts of "this is hard to defend" while also being in the the most litigious possible industry for fair use
TimTheTinker · 14h ago
Not according to US federal statute.
Fair use encompasses a lot of possible scenarios involving copyrighted works which may or may not be commercially licensed: transformative derivative works, short excerpts for purposes of commentary, backups of copies obtained legally, playback for face-to-face instruction, etc.
__loam · 14h ago
Fair use has consideration for whether the derivative work disrupts the market for the original, it doesn't mean you can't use it for profit as we saw with the Google books case.
Hmm. Still has the biggest issue I’ve observed with AI songs in the past: the lyrics don’t have a consistent or pleasing rhythm. It seems like the lyrics are generated with little regard to rhythm, then the melody is generated and tries to fit the lyrics without being able to change them. The result is a song where verses constantly have too many syllables (resulting in them spilling into the next meter when adjacent verses don’t), or too few syllables (resulting in awkward rests), or syllables with the wrong stresses. Occasionally the singing tries to compensate by just skipping syllables. In the second verse, the word “whispering” is replaced by an indistinct two-syllable word that sounds like “forming”. In the chorus, the phrase “the dimensions” merges the first two syllables to sound like “the mentions”.
Someday, I’m sure, Suno will find a way to fix this issue. But today isn’t that day.
What I'd love more than generated audio files are if music AIs output sheet music or a Garage Band project file containing the same song. Much more useful to use as a musical base that way.
whywhywhywhy · 1d ago
Feel they didn't really test these genres
"Cajun synthpop chant" has no chanting or synths, it sounds more like country music with french woman vocals
TonyTrapp · 1d ago
None of the Acid House samples have anything to do with Acid House either. The Jungle samples sound more like Liquid Drum & Bass.
timeon · 18h ago
> The Jungle samples sound more like Liquid Drum & Bass.
So another slop?
lucasoshiro · 1d ago
When I try to mix genres that are too different, it chooses only one of them and ignore the others... let's see if it's better in the new version
whywhywhywhy · 23h ago
Makes it weird they chose to demo it like this imho when it's not good at that. This design makes it look like its specifically that being shown off.
ofrzeta · 20h ago
I tested around five genres although they were more mainstream than what you picked and they were quite good, for instance French Ska. If someone told me it was an actual French Ska band I wouldn't have doubted it. Or Klezmer music, but maybe the Jiddish wasn't totally correct.
otabdeveloper4 · 9h ago
All of the non-English lyrics are so cringe as to border on intentional parody.
svantana · 1d ago
Yes, suno has definitely focused more on lyric and melody than prompt following. If the prompt is more than 3-4 words then it deteriorates pretty quickly. I think one reason is that there's not a lot of high quality descriptions of music around - you can guess the genre of the artist, and you can scrape reviews and the like, but that will be pretty noisy.
natdempk · 1d ago
You can do a lot more detailed prompts with v4.5 than previously and instructions in [brackets] also go a long way now.
Mockapapella · 20h ago
Could you elaborate on the instructions in brackets part?
natdempk · 16h ago
Sure, you can do a lot of things here... stuff in [brackets] isn't sung.
For example I was trying to steer a melodic techno prompt recently in a better direction by putting stuff like this upfront:
All of this is just stuff I kind of made up and wanted in the song, but it meaningfully improved the output over just tags. I think "steering/nudging the generation space" is a decent idea for how I feel like this affects the output.
I also often use them to structure things around song structure like [intro], [break], [chorus], and even get more descriptive with these describing things or moments I'd like to happen. Again adherence is not perfect, but seems to help steer things.
One of my favorite tags I've seen is [Suck the entire song through vacuum] and well... I choose to believe, check out 1:29 https://suno.com/s/xdIDhlKQUed0Dp1I
Worth playing around with a bunch, especially if you're not quite getting something interesting or in the direction you want.
dumpsterdiver · 19h ago
Brackets such as [Verse] help provide waveform separation in the edit view so that you can easily edit that section without manually dragging the slider.
Others such as [Interrupt] will provide a DJ-like fade-out / announcement (that was <Artist name>, next up..." / fade-in - providing an opportunity to break the AI out of repetitive loops it obsesses about.
I've used [Bridge] successfully, and [Instrumental] [No vocals] work reliably as well (there are also instrumental options, but I still use brackets out of habit I guess).
mclau157 · 1d ago
Agreed, Suno still very often does not follow instructions
cryptonector · 11h ago
I put in "milonga" and it didn't know what to do with it. I put in "tango" and it gave me a bandoneon solo that meandered jazz-like -- it wasn't bad, but it wasn't tango either. For "vals" it gave me more of what it gave me for "tango". For "candombé" it gave me nonsense. But all the pre-canned stuff sounded pretty good to me. I guess if I was familiar with "Russian techno" I might find what Suno generates for that to be garbage.
jppope · 1d ago
Love the site, and impressed by what they generated there. With that said... I'm starting to feel like music might be the last thing to be affected by Generative AI.
I IV V with different accents over the music and different drum sounds is fine, but thats not really music. It's pretty bad when you can pick out the chords progression in 5 sec. Cue the infamous 4-chord song skit by Axis of Awesome.
postexitus · 23h ago
I actually am of the exact opposite opinion. With image / text / video, I am much more able to differentiate between AI vs human.
However in music - there is so much badly done human music as well, for me it's nearly impossible to understand the difference between a badly done human music and a high fidelity AI music (the chord progression, happens as often in human music). Moreover, I have put Suno AI on playlist mode before and it's actually been enjoyable, and I am a big AI sceptic! Sometimes even more so than Spotify's own (although they've been accused of putting AI music on playlists as well - but I am fairly sure the weak stuff that put me off was by humans - did I say I cannot differentiate?).
Especially some music genres - like Japanese Vocaloid ; Power Metal, some country, where certain genre specific things overwhelm the piece, AI does a very good job in mimicking those from the best of the best and put meagre efforts to shame.
Agreed, am a musician too, and especially for popular music, AI music is as complex and often indistinguishable from music created by humans.
Kind of sad, especially for composers (which I am trying to be). Ah well, can only keep moving forward.
brookst · 18h ago
I’m only an occasional hobbyist, but I am super excited for how AI can empower me to write ideas I want, but which are beyond my ability and / or not possible using normal tools. I really think we’ll see a revolution in music theory once it’s easy to incorporate microtonal, multi-tempo, and other crazy stuff.
Also as we can blur the line between instrument and audio; why can’t my piano morph into an organ over the course of a piece? (I’m familiar with the Korg Morpheus and similar; I mean in a much more real sense).
computerdork · 15h ago
I do agree with you about AI music powering a revolution - it really creates some amazing music and it's still early in the technology - But for us musicians who studied literally decades to learn all these techniques (harmony, counterpoint, music form, polyrhythms, piano, partimento...), it's painful to see that others can create a piece of music in seconds which took us a lifetime to learn how to do (I write mainly classical music and it was a punch in the gut when I first heard Udio's classical music generation. Very impressive - sigh).
An no disrepect towards anyone using AI to create music, it is here and unstoppable, but I don't currently use generative AI in music myself. Yeah, think for performed works for a live audience (at least in classical music), most people want to hear music composed by humans (for the most part). Hopefully, will stay this way for awhile, otherwise, I've been going down a road that goes nowhere. Ah well, wouldn't be the first time:)
brookst · 12h ago
100% agreed. But I think it is like any other revolution that pushes human creativity to a higher level of abstraction.
Someone on HN, don’t remember who, made the observation that some artists mistake mastery of tools for the art, whereas artists who focus on the actual art can roll with changes to the tools.
computerdork · 9h ago
Agree with this for the most part. In fact, I write my pieces by hand on paper, use notation software (Dorico) to create the sheet music, listen to the piece using playback software (Noteperformer) which is connected to multiple virtual instruments (BBC Symphony Orchestra, etc.). These are all wonderful tools, and make writing music easier. For me at leas, they're not absolutely necessary, but are definitely helpful.
But, AI isn't just a tool, it's actually generating musical ideas at a highly finished level. For the first time, we have something that takes over a substantial amount of the creativity used to write a piece, a process which has always been the domain of people, and it's doing it at levels that are close to what the best skilled humans can do. Yeah, this isn't just something that aids creation, but is doing the creating itself.
Maybe one day, will use AI to create substantial amounts of the music I write, but am not nearly at that point yet - don't think most classical concert audiences want to got to a concert hall to hear AI generated music, but that may change. Guess we'll have to wait and see.
netdevphoenix · 23h ago
> I IV V with different accents over the music and different drum sounds is fine, but thats not really music
Music is more about the human that made it and their relation to you than the sound properties themselves. Same as other art. The more indirect the music process and the further you are from the living experience of the human creator, the less it resembles art. I feel art is more of an spectrum rather than a binary switch and the metric is how much direct human involvement did the audio experience have in terms that you can relate to.
Remove the human completely and you just have sound. It is likely that something like bepop, gabber or industrial synthwave would have been considered "sounds" rather than art by medieval folks or Mesopotamian people if they heard the sounds without knowing whether the source was human or not. Same with us if we were to heard some music from the year 3200 or 4500, we would likely not consider it music.
jppope · 23h ago
thats exactly what I'm feeling. GenAi for images or text is useful, it feels like the resolved values can be added to things or accomplish a purpose. The GenAI music feels like sound (as you put it) - like great its there, but thats not music.
spaceman_2020 · 11h ago
It’s not replacing the music I listen to, but its definitely capable of replacing the random music I hear on the radio
bongodongobob · 22h ago
Suno is way more than that. Listen to the jazz tags or something, you're being way over dismissive here.
NexRebular · 19h ago
But why would I ever want to listen something generated by someone else when I can just generate infinite amount of the same stuff myself?
bongodongobob · 18h ago
Because it sounds good, you can do both.
NexRebular · 18h ago
But what's the point of spending time and thought for music prompted by others?
What I can generate sounds exactly as good and has the exact same value...
brookst · 18h ago
Can’t you say the same thing about why listen to human jazz musicians?
NexRebular · 18h ago
I am not a jazz musician. I can't generate their music, all the nuances, the improvisation or the feeling... in other words the human factor of their craft 1 to 1 with a press of a button.
userbinator · 11h ago
I stumbled into the rabbithole of AI-generated music on Youtube several months ago, without realising it was AI, and I don't know if they're using Suno or some other generator, but I was impressed and entertained. I doubt it will replace real concerts but for background music and the like, it definitely does its job.
smusamashah · 1d ago
I tried Urdu. The music quality seems good but the pronunciation is wrong (e.g. slight aa sound instead of ee sound) for many simple common words and helper words.
But I don't understand why its wrong. If its trained on lots of Urdu/Hindi music, no one pronounces those words like that. How does it get the a/e wrong while still singing almost correctly? It's weird.
aidenn0 · 20h ago
The vowels sound subtly wrong for English on the alternative rock station, but that might just be Eddie Vedder being in the training set...
i want the reverse. i give it a song and it tells me what the description is, and then let me search other existing songs. i have a bunch of weird music that i like and not even their creator's other songs sound much like the one song that i like...
omnibrain · 9h ago
My favourite example is a famous pop song: Desert Rose by Sting. There isn’t much else like it, I could find.
joshu · 8h ago
Exactly. I want fine grained per-song features/genres so I can find similar things.
carefish · 2h ago
Am I one of the few that strongly dislikes verbiage like 'Commercial use rights for songs made while subscribed' on their billing page, it feels and smells an awful lot like 'You'll own nothing and you'll be happy'. Also feels like another race to the bottom for yet another creative field. Not trying to dissuade usage of tools like this by others but it leaves a bad after taste.
Whilst it's not clear where the training data is coming from, how can I be sure that I won't accidentally trip up something like YouTube's Content Match tool or other companies whom act on behalf of a copyright holder? Or did I miss something?
neom · 12h ago
It's gotten really good, I had it produce a track with double vocal harmonies as I instructed, it can also do echo and stuff now. I'm kinda annoyed that to try to remove the crispness they've just put dampening on it, it sounds... damp now... I'd take bright over damp.
hombre_fatal · 1d ago
That's a sick UI gimmick.
And it's even cleverly mobile friendly.
mrandish · 20h ago
Personally, I have little interest in typing a text prompt and getting a complete song as an output. However, I will gladly pay serious money for a tool that interactively collaborates with me in a granular, iterative process of generating, adjusting and mixing individual instruments and sections toward a finished multi-track song project.
Allow users to creatively engage by providing suggested starting places in the form of BPM, key and chord progressions or as brief audio and/or MIDI sketches. For example, let me give the AI a simple sketch of a couple bars of melody as MIDI notes, then have it give me back several variations of matching rhythm section and harmonies. Then take my textual feedback on adjustments I'd like but let me be specific when necessary, down to per-section or individual instrument. Ideally, the interface should look like a simplified multi-track DAW, making it easy for users to lock or unlock individual tracks so the AI knows what to keep and what to change as we creatively iterate. Once finished, provide output as both full mix and separate audio stems with optional MIDI for tracks with traditional instruments.
Targeting this use case accomplishes two crucial things. First, it lowers the bar of quality the AI has to match to be useful and compelling. Let's face it, generating lyrics, melodies, instrumental performances and production techniques more compelling than a top notch team of humans is hard for an AI. Doing it every time and only in the form of a complete, fully produced song is currently nearly impossible. The second thing it does is increase the tangible value the AI can contribute right now. Today it can be the rhythm section I lack, tomorrow it can fill in for the session guitarist I need, next week it can help me come up with new chord progression ideas. It would be useful every time I want to create music, whether I need backing vocals, a tight bass riff, scary viola tremelos or just some musical inspiration. And nothing it did would have to be perfect to be insanely useful - because I can tweak individual audio stems and MIDI tracks far faster than trying to explain a certain swing shuffle feel in text prompts.
Seriously, for a tool anything like what I've described, I'd be all-in for at least $30/mo if it's only half-assed. Once it's 3/4-assed put me down for $50/mo - and I'm not even a pro or semi-pro musician or producer, just a musical hobbyist who screws around making stuff no one else ever hears. Sure, actual music creators are a smaller market than music listeners but we're loyal, not as price sensitive and our needs for perfection in collaborators are far lower too. Plus, all those granular interactions as we iterate with your AI step-by-step towards "great", becomes invaluable training data - yet doesn't require us creators to surrender rights to our final output. For training data, the journey is (literally) the reward.
mjr00 · 19h ago
Honestly I don't think Suno knows who's supposed to be using their product. There's valid use cases for typing a text prompt and getting a song with zero fuss: background music in YouTube videos or corporate training videos, intro music for events (Starcraft fans know the ASL has been abusing Suno songs for a few seasons now), an AI-generated playlist running in the background in a cafe, etc. But those use cases don't seem worth too much, when you consider that music was effectively already free--you can hop onto Soundcloud and filter by Creative Commons and there's an unlimited number of songs you can use for these cases.[0] It remains to be seen how big the market for content creators who would actually pay for AI-generated songs rather than just pull CC tracks from Soundcloud is.
So then there's the casual end-user who's making music for themselves to listen to. IMO this is largely a novelty that hasn't worked out. I haven't heard many people regularly listen to Suno because, again, music is already incredibly cheap. Spotify is ~$15/month and it gives you access to the Beatles and Rolling Stones. The novelty of AI-generated "Korean goa psytrance 2-step" is fun for a bit, but how much will people pay for it, how many, and for how long?
I do think there's a lot of potential targeting musicians who incorporate AI-generated elements in their songs. (Disclaimer: I am a musician who has been using vocal synths for many years, and have started incorporating AI-generated samples into my workflows.) However as you point out, the functionality needed for Suno to work here is very different from the "write prompt, get fully complete song" use case.
It'll be interesting to see where it goes from here. In general, AI-based tooling does appear to be pivoting more towards "tools for creators" rather than "magic button that produces content", so I'm hopeful.
[0] One notable one is the artist "009 Sound System", who had a bunch of CC-licensed tracks that became popular due to YouTube's music swapping feature; since the list was sorted alphabetically, their tracks ended up getting used in a ton of videos and gaining popularity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Perls#YouTube
mrandish · 18h ago
> the functionality needed for Suno to work here is very different from the "write prompt, get fully complete song" use case.
Yeah, AI music gen is super fun to play with for a half-hour or so - and it's great when I need a novelty song made for a friend's wedding or special birthday - like, once a year maybe. But neither of those seems like a use case that leads to sustainable, high-value ARR. I'm starting to wonder if maybe most AI music generation companies ended up here because AI researchers saw a huge pile of awesome produced content that was already partially tagged and it looked like too perfect of a nail not to swing their LLM hammer at. And, until recently, VCs were throwing money at anything "AI" without needing to show product/market fit.
I'm not sure they fully thought through the use case of typical music listeners or considered the entrenched competition offering >95% of all music humans have ever recorded - for around ~$10/mo. As you said, another potential customer is media producers who need background tracks for social media videos but between the stock music industry offering millions of great tracks for pennies each and the "Fivver"-type producers who'll make a surprisingly good custom track in a day that you can own for $25 - I'm not seeing much ARR for AI music generators there either.
Currently the launch hypothesis of AI music generation puts them in direct competition against mature, high-quality alternatives that are already entrenched and cheap. And those use cases are currently being served by literally the best-of-the-best content humanity has ever created. Targeting replacing that as their first target seems as dumb as a SpaceX setting "Landing on Mars" as the goal of their first launch. There's no way to incrementally iterate toward that value proposition. Sure, targeting more modest incremental goals may be less exciting, but it also doesn't require perfection. Fortunately, music producers have needs that are more tractable but still valuable to solve - and not currently well served by cheap, plentiful, high-quality alternatives. And music producers are generally easier to reach, satisfy and retain long-term than 'music listeners' or 'music licensers'.
velcrobeg · 1h ago
have you looked at the Music AI sandbox that Google announced? it seems more instrument and editing based.
But I honestly don't see the point. The journey is the whole point when making music or any art really. AI doesn't solve a problem here. There never has been one in the first place. There is more music out there than you could ever listen to. Automating something humans deeply enjoy is misguided.
brookst · 18h ago
There’s not one right way you art. . . Plenty of artists like Warhol and Dali used mass production and automation.
If you enjoy writing music your way, great. But I strongly disagree that it’s a mistake to enable people to approach it differently.
cardanome · 17h ago
I actually used to have the exact same position when stable diffusion came out.
All my artists friends where criticizing it and I was thinking it was some form of Neo-Ludditism that they were following. Why not embrace progress? No one is stopping them to not use it but if it helps lower the barrier of entry isn't that great? Surely generative AI could be used to enhance of the workflow of an artist?
Oh, how I have been wrong. In reality it has only been used to replace artists. To devalue their work. It has not place in a artists pipeline.
I think the use of generative AI or at least of generalist LLM's is something fundamentally different than artists embracing new media and new processes. Like digital drawing is still roughly the same process as drawing on paper. The process is largely the same and most skills carry over. You are still in control. Using a prompt to create images is something that is not drawing.
I see the argument but can’t agree. To me it feels like pining for all of the lost typist jobs when word processors appeared.
Artists aren’t entitled to a job any more than I am; to the extent they (or I) do work that is easily replaced, by AI or offshoring or anything, that’s a career risk.
Those same tools enable artists to be more productive, more creative, more capable. The people suffering are those who are attached to the tools they learned with. We in tech know that’s a bad long term idea, and it is surprising in the arts. But on the whole, human creativity and overall output of great art will benefit from this change.
Kiro · 10h ago
Your initial opinion was the right one. Too bad you let yourself be bullied into changing it by the vocal minority of online personalities. Artists that are not influencers have already embraced AI.
mjr00 · 19h ago
Generative tools and AI are great for finding inspiration. Same as using presets (which many do still think is "cheating" despite everyone doing it). Ultimately all listeners care about is the end result, not how it was made.
cardanome · 19h ago
There wouldn't be a point in seeing artists play live if people only cared about the end result.
Listening to the studio mix on my headphones at home will always be better sound than being in a crowded concert.
I mean you are right to a certain degree, if it works, it works and if generative tools inspire you to make better music that is great. I am not so sure about that though.
I am forced to vibe code at work and it has not make me more creative. Is has made me want to quit my job.
mjr00 · 18h ago
Artists playing live is the end result though. If anything, the fact that people go to see Katy Perry in concert and not Max Martin, or how Tiesto is still a massive festival draw despite everyone knowing he's used ghost producers for 2 decades, are great examples of how little people care about the process of music being made versus the end result.
I'm not saying you need to use generative tools, but if it helps you make music you should do it. Ultimately what you're sharing with the world is your taste, not your technical abilities. To slightly expand on a famous quote in the music world -
> I thought using AI was cheating, so I used loops. I then thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
kadushka · 18h ago
Try aiva.ai
mrandish · 17h ago
Thanks for the suggestion. It looks closer to what I want than anything I've seen so far. Probably still not granular enough but much closer and headed in the right direction.
93po · 18h ago
i'm not really into music, at all, but would easily pay $50/month to be able to have this functionality, too. even just the tools being what they are i've spent over a dozen hours playing around with it because it's so much fun. add the ability to separate parts of the tracks and select portions specifically to change and i'd use this constantly, all the time
sgt · 1d ago
If you actually know some of the languages and you realize they are just singing jibberish (much worse than actual real songs), it's impossible to listen to. The instrumental ones can be great.
hiccuphippo · 18h ago
The Beatles had a song with a gibberish mix of Spanish, Portuguese and Italian and I very much enjoy it.
I speak Japanese — I'm pretty sure it isn't gibberish when I put in custom lyrics. (It does sometime read Kanji wrong but not when you put in the pronunciation)
I can't say anything about autogenerated lyrics.
bradleykingz · 22h ago
I love listening to African folk music. I don't understand the lyrics but really enjoy the music.
I've found some okay but listening to "meaningless" music doesn't sit right with me
coumbaya · 21h ago
The French ones I listened to where legit
moralestapia · 23h ago
Nope, on the Spanish stations I listened to, it's great.
Which one are you referring to?
kkoncevicius · 13h ago
16-bit blends (i.e. 16-bit Portuguese) do not feel like proper 16-bit sound.
Right now it probably blends the styles together, taking elements from both, but not following the required restrictions.
killerstorm · 16h ago
I'd be a lot more interested in AI which can take existing music as the base. I don't want a new song, I want to hear music I love in a new way. Like img2img but track2track.
vunderba · 15h ago
Have you actually looked at Suno? Img2Img is effectively "Cover mode" - you upload an existing WAV/MP3.
visarga · 1d ago
I can't get Suno to obey the style tags, it's as if they are not used at all in generating the output, or massively changed. Maybe they do the same trick Gemini used to generate the black queen of England. Or it's a trick to waste our credits faster, the only way to get something decent is to spin the dice many times.
natdempk · 1d ago
v4.5 is a lot better at adherence with detailed descriptions!
Still not totally adherent, but if you can steer it with genre, detailed descriptions of genre, and elements of the genre it's way better than v4. Some descriptions work better than others so there's some experimentation to figure out what works for what you're trying to achieve.
You can also provide descriptions in [brackets] in the lyrics that work reasonably well in my experience.
Disclaimer: I work there as a SWE.
v64 · 23h ago
Have been using Suno over the last few iterations and can vouch for this; steering the final product with style tags is a lot better now and I can use more natural language rather than trying to come up with what the genre specific "wordings" for certain styles of music would be. Good to know the tip about the brackets in lyrics too.
Some examples of style descriptions I've used that generated results close to what I had in mind are "romantic comedy intro music, fast and exciting, new york city" (aiming for something like the Sex and the City theme) and "mature adult romance reality tv show theme song, breakbeats, seductive, intimate, saxophones, lots of saxophones" which did indeed produce cheesy porn music.
brookst · 18h ago
Please make noise internally that the product desperately needs a tutorial and a prompting guide! It’s amazing if you hang out on Discord and spend a lot of time learning, but people just sitting down with it have no idea how to use it.
natdempk · 16h ago
Duly noted, thanks for the feedback.
logicchains · 1d ago
It seems to lean heavily on the lyrics when choosing the style; if you pick a style that doesn't match well with the lyrics, it'll kinda ignore it.
XenophileJKO · 1d ago
I'm still experimenting with what works and doesn't work. Currently for style I am trying things like:
-----
STYLE: Earth Circuit Fusion
INSTRUMENTATION:
- Deep analog synth bass with subtle distortion
- Hybrid percussion combining djembe and electronic glitches
- Polytonal synth arpeggios with unpredictable patterns
- Processed field recordings for atmospheric texture
- Circuit-bent toys creating unexpected melodic accents
VOCAL APPROACH:
- Female vocalist with rich mid-range and clear upper register
- Intimate yet confident delivery with controlled vibrato
- Layered whisper-singing technique in verses
- Full-voiced chorus delivery with slight emotional rasp
- Spoken-word elements layered under bridge melodies
- Stacked fifth harmonies creating ethereal chorus quality
PRODUCTION:
- Grainy tape saturation on organic elements
- Juxtaposition of lo-fi and hi-fi within same sections
- Strategic arrangement dropouts for dramatic impact
- Glitch transition effects between sections
---
One thing I have noticed with the new model is that it listens to direction in the lyrics more now, for example [whispered] or [bass drop], etc.
There are clear limits. I have been unsuccessful in spacial arrangement.
EDIT: I realized I didn't specify, this is when you do custom and you specify the lyrics and the style separately.
miffe · 13h ago
Still not able to generate a "Italo disco, sea shanty". Me and my friends have been trying since v3 somthing.
andrewclunn · 1d ago
I've been doing music composition and songwriting as a hobby for a decade. 4.0 is where Suno added enough features where workshopping things conceptually there first made it worth it, even for someone who can and often will, break apart stems into composite instruments and then manually adjust as needed. People always worry about what this means at the low effort "spray and pray" approach to music, but ultimately, it also allows for faster and cheaper iteration and development for all involved. Is the finished product ultimately "better" though? You be the judge.
For comparison, here's a song where I forced myself to do everything within Suno (took less than a week):
I'm conflicted about this. I want to dislike it, but frankly I don't appreciate the actual musicianship in music the majority of the time. If I'm listening to something that has broad and long-lasting culture impact like Bach, or Britney Spears, it really matters more about how it's been received than the actual quality of the music.
Or, if I'm listening to music just for the vibe, I really don't care how it's created, as long as it doesn't offend me auditorially. I'm really not listening actively. So I suppose that's a bit of an indictment of myself, but I don't think it's a serious character flaw in myself. I should probably just try to pay more attention to the people around me at all times.
I have a lot of fun putting my own poetry in here and mashing it up with the styles that I enjoy listening to, or that I think would work well with the poem. Again, I don't want to like it, but I do.
particle_theory · 22h ago
I got suno to render a song that I used to sing to my daughter when she was a baby. After some amount of fiddling, it produced something quite nice and for this I am eternally grateful to AI.
tsoa · 14h ago
Where's defiant jazz?
transitivebs · 13h ago
love this reference :)
S0y · 1d ago
Honestly it baffles me at this point that Suno keeps trying to generate lyrics when everything else it generates sounds so good.
All of these example get ruined by the most simple and boring lyrics imaginable. Poetry is an art and clearly the model doesn't yet grasp all of its nuances like it does for the rest of the "composition".
At this point the only thing that gives this away as AI generated are the vocals.
johnfn · 23h ago
Yeah, I find it funny that they have this super strong music generation model, but then they use what could only be GPT 3.5 for lyrics.
RugnirViking · 17h ago
I think it's because, like a first year writing student trying poetry, it tries a little too hard to make the lyrics coherent and storytelling in a script read from a page. A lot of real song lyrics have a whole lot of repetition, non sequiturs, and break grammar rules to fit the meter better
johnfn · 17h ago
I mean, perhaps I should have made this more clear, but later models of GPT are leaps and bounds better than whatever suno is currently using.
natdempk · 17h ago
Have you tried out the Remi lyrics model in custom mode? It’s a lot more unhinged and creative in both very good and very… interesting ways. I’d check it out if you’re interested in lyrics generation.
otabdeveloper4 · 1d ago
> At this point the only thing that gives this away as AI generated are the vocals.
Only because the bar for music is so low nowadays. Thankfully poetry hasn't been commodified yet liked music has.
bongodongobob · 22h ago
Use GPT for the lyrics then, you don't have to use Suno for that.
S0y · 1d ago
>Take the plunge in the strength of the breakbeat,
>Among the stars, where the dreams and freedom meet.
>Finding the ecstasy of life’s uncharted quest,
>In every pulse of the music, feel the zest.
Like... what?
dumpsterdiver · 16h ago
If anyone is interested in the difference between "AI slop" and something with a couple thousand credits into it, here's my #soundseasons entry (I don't expect to place; the end needs work I didn't have the energy for (and I mean even if I did...)):
Here's another one I put a bit of time into, but with a much simpler structure. What I appreciated about the original were the emotions it stirred up when the notes came together just-so:
When you ignore the stuff that humans shouldn't get credit for - e.g. I didn't "make" this song, or play any part in its "production", but I did "curate" it - there's still something left to give credit for, right? It's basically like a DJ digging through a mysterious crate of records.
88stacks · 13h ago
I want an api version of suno!
n8m8 · 22h ago
I still hear hissing on many of the examples, has that improved?
nilslindemann · 13h ago
My Groove list is better :)
fuzzythinker · 21h ago
Love the UI! Beautiful and great for exploration.
satisfice · 6h ago
What is it? I hate products that are soooo coooooool that they don't even bother to explain what they are.
Something about music? okay. What else? Is it all fake music or something?
cynicalpeace · 20h ago
I have a hypothesis that AI music and other arts will not take off.
My reasoning is that the fact that it was made by another human is really important.
Not only because you might think a piece of music is lame because it was made by AI vs a human.
But also because all the things that bring you back to a piece of art is wrapped up in the person that made it.
People who are immense fans of the Beatles, Taylor Swift or Kanye West illustrate this point.
You keep coming back because you liked this person's music before, and so you can't wait to preorder their music in the future.
Same goes for books, paintings and really all other art I can think of.
An artist develops a following that snowballs into their music being broadly consumed.
There are "AI music artists" that have been around for a decade. Miquela is the one I know about. But in that timespan, hundreds of human artists have developed followings and cultural sway that far outweigh what Miquela has done.
It seems more and more that AI is simply another tool for humans to use. Rather than a replacement altogether of humans.
Rochus · 6h ago
> My reasoning is that the fact that it was made by another human is really important.
This presupposes that people are still able to tell the difference between computer-generated and human-generated music, which, in my opinion (as a trained musician and former producer), is no longer the case for the majority of people.
Music and musicians undoubtedly also fulfill an "idol function." But the industry has long since provided an answer to this, for example with highly successful, artificially optimized boy or girl groups. With "Milli Vanilli," they took it to the extreme by having the "musicians" no longer sing themselves, but were chosen solely for their effect on the audience. This also works with computer-generated music, only much cheaper.
IAmGraydon · 10h ago
I'm a musician and I've been pretty excited about AI music generation, which seems to stand in contrast to most musicians. So far though, the available AI music gens are just plain terrible, including Suno 4.5. Everything sounds exactly like what you would get if you bought a library of really bad loops and just layered some together. Boring rhythms. Boring harmonic progressions. Boring melody. Boring lyrics. It's just terrible. I just listened to around 100 song on Suno and I didn't find one that was even remotely interesting or even just fun to listen to. I'm not a music snob - I'll listen to everything from Sigur Ros to At the Drive-In to Insomnium to Ella Fitzgerald to Taylor Swift to Dua Lipa. I just want something that can grab my attention, show me something interesting, and generate a feeling.
Here's the thing about music - what makes a good song is a sense of unexpected familiarity. In other words, it's based on a set of broad, familiar rules (music theory), but surprises you by implementing those rules in a way that's extremely unique and novel. Because generative AI is kind of like an averaging machine, rounding off the outliers, what you get is an example of the rules in the most boring, typical way possible. It completely lacks the element of surprise, and I'm not sure it will ever be capable of that essential element of surprise because of how it fundamentally works. If you want to generate a bunch of background elevator music, however, this seems to be extremely useful for that.
Rochus · 13h ago
Wow, this is just great. As a musician with computer science background (or vice versa) I'm just stunned. E.g. this track blew me away: https://suno.com/song/6478ac9a-00e9-4f7d-81bb-b0991001d236. The drums and the sax solo are just great, sound like from the best musicians on the planet. It's fasctinating what comes out of this grab bag with each click.
EDIT: don't understand why this statement is downvoted; since when has HN been hostile to technology? Or if you think this is a paid bot comment, I'm real, here's my website: http://rochus-keller.ch/?cat=3
isaacfrond · 3h ago
That is some cool jazz
iandanforth · 23h ago
I recommend clicking around on genres for languages you don't speak. The songs sound great as long as you don't know what they are saying. Lyrics are still a very weak point for AI music, still, infinite enjoyment as long as you're ignorant of the flaws!
jacooper · 18h ago
This is going to be a life changer for youtubers and creatives who need background songs for their videos, you can now create tailored songs for whatever you need.
Its great, however it sucked in other languages, sounding like a foreigner trying to speak like a local.
tmaly · 21h ago
I honestly would like to see an open source music model that can generate the stems
93po · 18h ago
regular player on main site is entirely broken in firefox :(
DataDaemon · 1d ago
"I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
hiccuphippo · 19h ago
If you enjoy doing art and writing then great, AI will never take that from you. If it's your job, then it can take some of the load from you so you can go do things you enjoy.
I started using it to generate songs that reinforce emotional regulation strategies -things like grounding, breathwork, staying present. Not instructional tracks, which would be unbearable, but actual songs with lyrics that reflect actual practice and skills.
It started as a way to help me decompress after therapy. I'd listen to a mini-album I made during the drive home. Eventually, I’d catch myself recalling a lyric in stressful moments elsewhere. That was the moment things clicked. The songs weren’t just a way for me to calm down on the way home, they were teaching me real emotional skills I could use in all parts of my life. I wasn’t consciously practicing mindfulness anymore; it was showing up on its own. Since then I’ve been iterating, writing lyrics that reflect emotional-cognitive skills, generating songs with them, and listening while I'm in the car. It's honestly changed my life in a subtle but deep way.
We already have work songs, lullabies, marching music, and religious chants - all music that serves a purpose besides existing to be listened to. Music that exists to teach us ways of interacting is a largely untapped idea.
This is the kind of functional application is what generative music is perfect for. Song can be so much more than listening to terminally romantic lyricists trying to speak to the lowest common denominator. They can teach us to be better versions of ourselves.
Still, I’m excited about the product. The composer could probably use some chain of thought if it doesn’t already, and plan larger sequences and how they relate to each other. Suno is also probably the most ripe for a functional neurosymbolic model. CPE wrote an algorithm on counterpoint hundreds of years ago!
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/4qul1b/crea... (Note the original site has been taken over, but you can access the original via way back. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a save where the generation demo works…but I swear it did! I used it at the time!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C.P.U._Bach
https://suno.com/playlist/d2886382-bcb9-4d6d-8d7a-78625adcbe...
A friend recently made a simple app/site where he can pick the bpm of the music (he likes running listening to 180bpm), then see a bunch of songs and create a quick playlist he can load on Spotify with 1 click and go running
That got me thinking it would be cool to use suno/ai to create activity-specific songs, like songs about/for running or biking, or studying, or working, or painting. Instead of trying to curate popular hit songs to fit the task
But I really think they've made a mistake with direction, realistically it should've been trained on tracker files, and build somgs via the method (but generate the vocals,individual instrument sounds for midi, obvs).
I think the quality would be higher since the track can be "rendered" out essentially, but also only then would it be a useful tool for actual musicians, to be able to get a skeleton file (mod, etc) for a song built up that they can then tweak and add a human touch to.
https://suno.com/playlist/e6c3f3d1-a746-4106-bea1-e36073d227...
Side note: It feels a little vulnerable to be sharing these. They genuinely helped me through difficult times and I wasn't really expecting anyone else to ever listen to them.
https://music.apple.com/au/album/breath-of-the-cosmos/175227...
https://open.spotify.com/track/0mJoJ0XiQZ8HglUdhWhg2F?si=tID...
https://suno.com/s/LHRmE867FslALzz6
The first time I heard it, it was incredible. The 2nd wedding that did it, it started to feel boring. The 3rd time, everyone hated it.
Similar to image-generation, we're getting tired really fast of cookie-cutter art. I don't know how to feel about it.
That's not a tool issue. It just means that working on a raised floor is not the same a being able to reach a higher ceiling.
No comments yet
I don't know. Scrolling the Sora image generations feed is pretty fun.
It's got trendy memes, lots of mashups, and cool art. They've also managed to capture social media outrage bait on the platform: conservatives vs. liberals, Christians vs. atheists, and a whole other host of divisive issues that are interspersed throughout the feed. I think they have a social media play in the bag if they pursue it.
It feels like Sora could replace Instagram.
Weird, stupid things. Writing theme songs for TV shows that don't exist, finding ways to translate song types from culture A to culture B, BGM for a video game you want to make, a sales song for Shikoku 1889 to sell Iyo railway shares, etc...
Some of us have zero cultural influence and services like Suno mean we aren't listening to the original brainrot (popular music). Sure, you might create garbage but it's your garbage and you aren't stuck waiting for someone to throw you a bone.
I love Suno, it's a rare subscription that is fun.
I'm pretty sure that I actually could, if I really wanted to, create this cover legitimately and even put it on Spotify with royalties going to the original artists (it seems they have a blanket mechanical license for a lot of works). But it was a "gag" song that probably has a market of just me, so hiring a team of people would be a lot of time and money for 3 minutes of a giggle. I also would have to worry about things like if it's changed too much to be a cover and getting sued for putting in extra effort.
That being said, your idea isn't original; there's already a flood of automated AI-generated cover songs being pushed onto Spotify, and they + distributors are (allegedly) starting to actively combat this.
I'll say that this "Suno" thing makes good-sounding music to these non-musician ears right here, but trying a few of these I'm starting to notice it seems fake. But that's not very interesting. What's interesting is that they're going to get good enough to get past the phoniness.
> I don't know how to feel about it.
I know how I feel about it: I don't like it one bit.
It's personal taste, but this is significantly better than the last couple of fiction books I've read (which were both well reviewed).
I think it's good enough that it's hard to argue is emotionally vacuous, unless you define that to mean 'it was written by a machine'
I think increasing we'll find AIs are extremely good at emotional 'manipulation' (which I mean in the same sense has how a good tearjerker is in some sense emotionally manipulative).
I have a feeling that’s by design. Firstly for computation purposes, secondly to avoid someone making a studio-quality deepfake song.
But I'll bet you anything, the average ear won't care. This music is already as good as what's produceable by humans, and will be available for a fraction of the cost without the licensing fees. Be ready to see it popping up everywhere—in cafes, restaurants, on TV ads, on your next spotify playlist. These soundtracks will become ubiquitous, and these far cries in communities like these will become a marginalized minority just like any technology that's been superseded.
Human generated music will still exist, of course, as the deep emotional ties that humans feel towards others (artists) cannot be replaced by this technology. But, there are massive use cases where that type emotional connection is not necessary (everything i noted prior, but also game & movie soundtracks, in waiting areas, tv shows, etc), where I would place a strong bet that this will eventually become even more commonplace than human generated music.
I can't begin explain how taken aback I am by this comment, to call others cynical and come out with this - do you think these currently feature the work of anonymous composers of unloved background music?
Have you heard of the likes of Nobuo Uematsu, Yoko Shimomura, Lena Raine, John Williams, Clint Mansell, Ennio Morricone, Ramin Djawadi, Max Richter, holy shit Max Richter, have you never been pierced to your very core by something like On The Nature of Daylight used to perfect effect at an emotional climax in a movie or TV show? The hair on my arms is standing up just thinking about it.
This is the most shallow sampling of a group people who are beloved for their work in these media and likely for lifetimes beyond it.
As you get higher up the ladder budget wise, quality wise; I think it's an open question as to what will happen. Working with humans introduces another variable, adds expense, time complexity, and so on. Not every producer, 100% of the time, is going to think this tradeoff is any longer worth it, when they can generate something of similar quality without much effort. Universal has already announced they're doing something similar for script writing. It just seems natural that human-made music is also on the chopping block.
Yes this does sound like the enshittification of everything; and I'm certainly not advocating for this course of events at all. But granted how capitalism works, how the human mind works, it just seems like the direction things are likely to go, given how capable this technology is.
I can't say I fully agree with you on video game/movie soundtracks, but I think AI generated assets will make game development more accessible, especially for solo developers or small teams.
So I'd just say listen to what you like, see where technology leads us. I don't think human creators will be put out of buisiness any time soon, but they might get competition especially in 'functional' music.
"Don't set out to raze all shrines - you'll frighten men. Enshrine mediocrity - and the shrines are razed."
On the contrary, this comment is peak HN. The reverse take that a machine eating human art and creativity and selling the interpolated derivatives back to you after laundering it from royalties is a common good.
> Let's all tell ourselves that music requires that 'special human touch' or audiences will become bored, unimpressed and uninterested.
Ah those pesky humans, as opposed to corporate subscription-based content farms as the certified non-cynical happy future of music & art.
> This music is already as good as what's produceable by humans
It’s about as good as everything else generated with AI, like say a large code base. If you can’t tell, congrats.
And you wonder why people are cynical? Do you really think that the best answer to solve IP law and the blandness of pop-music is by making it so cheap that we make it available to everyone?
> But, there are massive use cases where that type emotional connection is not necessary (...) game & movie soundtracks, in waiting areas, tv shows
What will be the point of watching a movie or TV show, then? What will be the point of making one?
Did I say I'm advocating for this future? I'm simply stating an observation, and a likely outcome based on plenty of precedent of similar behavior in industry.
> What will be the point of watching a movie or TV show, then? What will be the point of making one?
I'm sure Michael Bay would consider what he does to be artistic expression; whilst others would say it's a semi-shameless money-grab. Half joking, don't take me too seriously.
I'm trying to use Suno 3.5 to create low quality 90s/00s-style MIDI music (similar to Vektroid[1]) since that's my favourite genre. Ironically, what it created[2] still doesn't properly evoke the hollow, tinny, low-quality computer-generated sound that I want to hear.
Specifically, it reduced the number of instruments, so the final result still sounded good. It didn't mash a bunch of MIDI instruments together and create something just a little incoherent that implies it was based on something better.
I think humans are better at stealing/remixing other songs and making them deliberately worse.
Tastes will probably change to be into whatever AI is unable to generate effectively and this seems similar to Stable Diffusion's inability to generate ugly people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_(Vektroid_album)
[2] https://suno.com/s/FVCY0EZhWucyg6zM
The tech is great, it's the music it produces that's unoriginal, uninspiring and bland.
> Be ready to see it popping up everywhere—in cafes, restaurants, on TV ads, on your next spotify playlist.
So music will become even shittier going forward? Yay tech! Thanks for automating away the act of music listening!
Seriously though, now that music-as-a-product has been killed by techbros, can we go back to music-as-an-act, like before? That would be the silver lining.
Human made music will continue to exist, but for me, just for me, a lot of it doesn't do anything at all and I wouldn't be able to tell if it's by human, let alone knowing the story behind them or the emotional connection the author had when making that piece of music. I'm sure many people who have better ear will be able to differentiate, but many others will not. You may say it's depressing, I call it reality.
edm anti-folk is also great: https://suno.com/song/47f0585c-ca41-4002-9d7f-fe71f85e0c62
It's kind of good, yeah!
it's first in one of the rows, on the left
If anyone here has a subscription and they can spare the tokens, I think it would be fun if someone shared a song about Hacker News.
I'm hoping that in the future tools like Suno will allow you to produce / generate songs as projects which you can tweak in greater detail; basically a way of making music by "vibe coding". With 4.0 the annotation capabilities were still a bit limited, and the singer could end up mispronouncing things without any way to fix or specify the correct pronunciation. This blog post mentions that with 4.5 they enhanced prompt interpretations, but it doesn't actually go into any technical details nor does it provide clear examples to get a real sense of the changes.
We can do better on user instruction for sure, duly noted. In my experience a lot of different stuff works (emotions, some musical direction sometimes, describing parts/layers of the track you want to exist, music-production-ish terminology, genres, stuff like intro/outro/chorus), but I think of it more as steering the space of the generated output rather than working 100% of the time. This can go in the style tags or in [brackets] in the lyrics. Definitely makes a difference in the outputs to be more descriptive with 4.5.
Your comment inspired me to upgrade it to 4.5 because it did have that AI tinny quality. https://suno.com/s/tbZlkBL7XeLVuuN0
It sounds better but has lost some magic.
Here is the original comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39997706
In that spirit, from the same “artist” here is your comment - https://suno.com/s/AumsIqrIovVhT0c9
And
https://suno.com/s/YGlpHptX6yXJVpHq
Not sure which I like more.
Everytime I clicked next I was subsconsciously cringing and expecting an unwelcome and jarring ad to blast through my speakers - and each time releived to actually be greeted by the next music track.
What have we done to ourselves.
It only feels like yesterday that the default was hoarding all your favourite tracks and playing them at will through winamp.
I'm not sure if this is solvable, but I think it should be a bigger research topic. If anyone knows of any papers on this, I haven't found one yet (not sure what to search for).
This is a really fascinating topic, and I think it might give us new insight into the human condition. I'm excited to see where this leads us.
can AI recognize what is best? can AI create what is recognized as best?
(you know how vast majority of humans think they are above average drivers?)
https://youtu.be/_PC6jwoHyOk?si=imjfG9khOI-hsJA0
https://youtu.be/Fkf4QYTfIxA?si=j-Fo8HN59xCbteD2
Etc etc
That is, you try something new (random) and you, the human, are also the verifier to see whether that random new thing was subjectively good, and then you select based on that.
In this understanding of creativity, creating a new style is a gradual process of evolution (mutation and selection) where your own brain is a necessary part of carrying out the selection. "Did the new idea (mutation) I just tried make me feel good or not (selection)?"
That activity of you being the verifier is effortless and instant, but the AI fundamentally can't tap into the verification and so it has no ability to do the selection step after randomness, and so it is impossible for creativity to emerge no matter the architecture (unless you somehow create a proxy for a human verifier which seems insanely hard).
The only solution I can see to this is to try to simulate this process, seems possible but hard.
What's the basis for this? Unfortunately it's hard to describe, but I've listened to a wide variety of popular and niche genres my whole life with a specific eye toward appreciating all the different ways people appreciate music and I know when something feels new.
Even most (or all?) pop music feels new. If it wasn't, I don't think it would be popular. Sure, it's all derivative, but what makes music enjoyable is when it combines influences in a fresh way.
"French house polka" achieved by doing a statistical blend of the two genres just isn't that interesting—it misses so many ways that things are combined by artists—specific details of the texture of the sound, how it's recorded, cultural references, tons of tiny little influences from specific artists and other genres, etc.
I've tried very specific prompts in Suno and it's not even close to useful for someone who knows what they're doing. The image generators are hardly better—things overwhelmingly trend toward a fixed set of specific styles that are well-represented in the training sets.
This critique falls down in certain areas though. Using tools like Suno to come up with songwriting ideas can be fantastic—as long as you have the taste to curate the outputs and feed it into your own creative process. It's also fantastic for creating vocal samples, and I'm sure it'll crush it for functional music (advertisements, certain types of social media) in short order
Suno currently is limited architecturally to in distribution components, so trying to create instruments or vocal styles it never heard won't work. The parts that you can work in are a vast and rich creative space.
https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c0cb1fd881919867820db3ee3850 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c027e10c8191936ac1e86adb5bcd https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815bf6174488191b2b93498059c4352 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815be7921b4819191544de9f06b336f https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815bf16568081918ef3d26d0572701d https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c00655888191a717f4ef8f895af3 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c0583198819184c4f01b8fa26ae0 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c0acb6fc8191a8a2ec0c71df307a https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c233ef00819189e0713abd0f3080 https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c265b0948191801b5c970451d705
For bonus points.. the tail-less crocodile.. https://chatgpt.com/s/m_6815c29c1bf081918c791447441c400e
You just lack imagination, like I said.. there are almost no limits but pixel density and aspect ratio currently.
Like I said, you know nothing about making art. (Not a big deal, not everybody needs to.)
In an alternative parallel universe we might have gotten actual AI tools for making art - these would be various infilling plugins, basically. ("Make me a Photoshop brush that paints pine-needle looking spiky things", that sort of thing.)
What we got in this reality is not that, though. Meme making of the sort you posted is not art.
(That said, making memes, especially of the spicy and/or topical kind, is the one niche that generative AI is good at and nails perfectly.)
I don't have to justify my art to anyone. The magic is.. you can't choose what is art. You can choose what YOU think is art and that's fine. However you can't dictate to the world what is art.
You’re right!
> Even jazz uses 6-2-5-1's over and over.
You’re not even wrong! I wonder if jazz does anything else besides that?
I keep wanting to save some of the songs I hear. Damn, I don't think I would really be able to tell in a blind test that these were AI.
I really don't like that UI. It's hard to read, and when I found something it slips. Too much form over function
> I keep wanting to save some of the songs I hear.
Just click the title of the song. If you have an account you can add to favorites, download, etc.
Oh, the joys of infinite public domain music!
I increasingly feel like withdrawing from the internet as well. Half of the users are bots anyway
So never feel discouraged because of slop.
I guess they are hoping for the Uber outcome where they earn enough money during the illegal phase so they can pay some tiny fine and keep going.
Suno admitted to train their models with copyrighted music and are now defending the position that music copyrights and royalties are bad for the future of music.
Fair use encompasses a lot of possible scenarios involving copyrighted works which may or may not be commercially licensed: transformative derivative works, short excerpts for purposes of commentary, backups of copies obtained legally, playback for face-to-face instruction, etc.
Someday, I’m sure, Suno will find a way to fix this issue. But today isn’t that day.
"Cajun synthpop chant" has no chanting or synths, it sounds more like country music with french woman vocals
So another slop?
For example I was trying to steer a melodic techno prompt recently in a better direction by putting stuff like this upfront:
All of this is just stuff I kind of made up and wanted in the song, but it meaningfully improved the output over just tags. I think "steering/nudging the generation space" is a decent idea for how I feel like this affects the output.I also often use them to structure things around song structure like [intro], [break], [chorus], and even get more descriptive with these describing things or moments I'd like to happen. Again adherence is not perfect, but seems to help steer things.
One of my favorite tags I've seen is [Suck the entire song through vacuum] and well... I choose to believe, check out 1:29 https://suno.com/s/xdIDhlKQUed0Dp1I
Worth playing around with a bunch, especially if you're not quite getting something interesting or in the direction you want.
Others such as [Interrupt] will provide a DJ-like fade-out / announcement (that was <Artist name>, next up..." / fade-in - providing an opportunity to break the AI out of repetitive loops it obsesses about.
I've used [Bridge] successfully, and [Instrumental] [No vocals] work reliably as well (there are also instrumental options, but I still use brackets out of habit I guess).
I IV V with different accents over the music and different drum sounds is fine, but thats not really music. It's pretty bad when you can pick out the chords progression in 5 sec. Cue the infamous 4-chord song skit by Axis of Awesome.
However in music - there is so much badly done human music as well, for me it's nearly impossible to understand the difference between a badly done human music and a high fidelity AI music (the chord progression, happens as often in human music). Moreover, I have put Suno AI on playlist mode before and it's actually been enjoyable, and I am a big AI sceptic! Sometimes even more so than Spotify's own (although they've been accused of putting AI music on playlists as well - but I am fairly sure the weak stuff that put me off was by humans - did I say I cannot differentiate?).
Especially some music genres - like Japanese Vocaloid ; Power Metal, some country, where certain genre specific things overwhelm the piece, AI does a very good job in mimicking those from the best of the best and put meagre efforts to shame.
Here is one AI song I generated in an earlier version of Suno - let me know if anything stands out as AI: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5JcEnU-x3s
and another I recorded in my studio with an artist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6mJcXxoppc
Kind of sad, especially for composers (which I am trying to be). Ah well, can only keep moving forward.
Also as we can blur the line between instrument and audio; why can’t my piano morph into an organ over the course of a piece? (I’m familiar with the Korg Morpheus and similar; I mean in a much more real sense).
An no disrepect towards anyone using AI to create music, it is here and unstoppable, but I don't currently use generative AI in music myself. Yeah, think for performed works for a live audience (at least in classical music), most people want to hear music composed by humans (for the most part). Hopefully, will stay this way for awhile, otherwise, I've been going down a road that goes nowhere. Ah well, wouldn't be the first time:)
Someone on HN, don’t remember who, made the observation that some artists mistake mastery of tools for the art, whereas artists who focus on the actual art can roll with changes to the tools.
But, AI isn't just a tool, it's actually generating musical ideas at a highly finished level. For the first time, we have something that takes over a substantial amount of the creativity used to write a piece, a process which has always been the domain of people, and it's doing it at levels that are close to what the best skilled humans can do. Yeah, this isn't just something that aids creation, but is doing the creating itself.
Maybe one day, will use AI to create substantial amounts of the music I write, but am not nearly at that point yet - don't think most classical concert audiences want to got to a concert hall to hear AI generated music, but that may change. Guess we'll have to wait and see.
Music is more about the human that made it and their relation to you than the sound properties themselves. Same as other art. The more indirect the music process and the further you are from the living experience of the human creator, the less it resembles art. I feel art is more of an spectrum rather than a binary switch and the metric is how much direct human involvement did the audio experience have in terms that you can relate to.
Remove the human completely and you just have sound. It is likely that something like bepop, gabber or industrial synthwave would have been considered "sounds" rather than art by medieval folks or Mesopotamian people if they heard the sounds without knowing whether the source was human or not. Same with us if we were to heard some music from the year 3200 or 4500, we would likely not consider it music.
But I don't understand why its wrong. If its trained on lots of Urdu/Hindi music, no one pronounces those words like that. How does it get the a/e wrong while still singing almost correctly? It's weird.
Whilst it's not clear where the training data is coming from, how can I be sure that I won't accidentally trip up something like YouTube's Content Match tool or other companies whom act on behalf of a copyright holder? Or did I miss something?
And it's even cleverly mobile friendly.
Allow users to creatively engage by providing suggested starting places in the form of BPM, key and chord progressions or as brief audio and/or MIDI sketches. For example, let me give the AI a simple sketch of a couple bars of melody as MIDI notes, then have it give me back several variations of matching rhythm section and harmonies. Then take my textual feedback on adjustments I'd like but let me be specific when necessary, down to per-section or individual instrument. Ideally, the interface should look like a simplified multi-track DAW, making it easy for users to lock or unlock individual tracks so the AI knows what to keep and what to change as we creatively iterate. Once finished, provide output as both full mix and separate audio stems with optional MIDI for tracks with traditional instruments.
Targeting this use case accomplishes two crucial things. First, it lowers the bar of quality the AI has to match to be useful and compelling. Let's face it, generating lyrics, melodies, instrumental performances and production techniques more compelling than a top notch team of humans is hard for an AI. Doing it every time and only in the form of a complete, fully produced song is currently nearly impossible. The second thing it does is increase the tangible value the AI can contribute right now. Today it can be the rhythm section I lack, tomorrow it can fill in for the session guitarist I need, next week it can help me come up with new chord progression ideas. It would be useful every time I want to create music, whether I need backing vocals, a tight bass riff, scary viola tremelos or just some musical inspiration. And nothing it did would have to be perfect to be insanely useful - because I can tweak individual audio stems and MIDI tracks far faster than trying to explain a certain swing shuffle feel in text prompts.
Seriously, for a tool anything like what I've described, I'd be all-in for at least $30/mo if it's only half-assed. Once it's 3/4-assed put me down for $50/mo - and I'm not even a pro or semi-pro musician or producer, just a musical hobbyist who screws around making stuff no one else ever hears. Sure, actual music creators are a smaller market than music listeners but we're loyal, not as price sensitive and our needs for perfection in collaborators are far lower too. Plus, all those granular interactions as we iterate with your AI step-by-step towards "great", becomes invaluable training data - yet doesn't require us creators to surrender rights to our final output. For training data, the journey is (literally) the reward.
So then there's the casual end-user who's making music for themselves to listen to. IMO this is largely a novelty that hasn't worked out. I haven't heard many people regularly listen to Suno because, again, music is already incredibly cheap. Spotify is ~$15/month and it gives you access to the Beatles and Rolling Stones. The novelty of AI-generated "Korean goa psytrance 2-step" is fun for a bit, but how much will people pay for it, how many, and for how long?
I do think there's a lot of potential targeting musicians who incorporate AI-generated elements in their songs. (Disclaimer: I am a musician who has been using vocal synths for many years, and have started incorporating AI-generated samples into my workflows.) However as you point out, the functionality needed for Suno to work here is very different from the "write prompt, get fully complete song" use case.
It'll be interesting to see where it goes from here. In general, AI-based tooling does appear to be pivoting more towards "tools for creators" rather than "magic button that produces content", so I'm hopeful.
[0] One notable one is the artist "009 Sound System", who had a bunch of CC-licensed tracks that became popular due to YouTube's music swapping feature; since the list was sorted alphabetically, their tracks ended up getting used in a ton of videos and gaining popularity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Perls#YouTube
Yeah, AI music gen is super fun to play with for a half-hour or so - and it's great when I need a novelty song made for a friend's wedding or special birthday - like, once a year maybe. But neither of those seems like a use case that leads to sustainable, high-value ARR. I'm starting to wonder if maybe most AI music generation companies ended up here because AI researchers saw a huge pile of awesome produced content that was already partially tagged and it looked like too perfect of a nail not to swing their LLM hammer at. And, until recently, VCs were throwing money at anything "AI" without needing to show product/market fit.
I'm not sure they fully thought through the use case of typical music listeners or considered the entrenched competition offering >95% of all music humans have ever recorded - for around ~$10/mo. As you said, another potential customer is media producers who need background tracks for social media videos but between the stock music industry offering millions of great tracks for pennies each and the "Fivver"-type producers who'll make a surprisingly good custom track in a day that you can own for $25 - I'm not seeing much ARR for AI music generators there either.
Currently the launch hypothesis of AI music generation puts them in direct competition against mature, high-quality alternatives that are already entrenched and cheap. And those use cases are currently being served by literally the best-of-the-best content humanity has ever created. Targeting replacing that as their first target seems as dumb as a SpaceX setting "Landing on Mars" as the goal of their first launch. There's no way to incrementally iterate toward that value proposition. Sure, targeting more modest incremental goals may be less exciting, but it also doesn't require perfection. Fortunately, music producers have needs that are more tractable but still valuable to solve - and not currently well served by cheap, plentiful, high-quality alternatives. And music producers are generally easier to reach, satisfy and retain long-term than 'music listeners' or 'music licensers'.
Plus Ableton Live itself has a lot of generative tools these days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RNXVfo-oLc
But I honestly don't see the point. The journey is the whole point when making music or any art really. AI doesn't solve a problem here. There never has been one in the first place. There is more music out there than you could ever listen to. Automating something humans deeply enjoy is misguided.
If you enjoy writing music your way, great. But I strongly disagree that it’s a mistake to enable people to approach it differently.
All my artists friends where criticizing it and I was thinking it was some form of Neo-Ludditism that they were following. Why not embrace progress? No one is stopping them to not use it but if it helps lower the barrier of entry isn't that great? Surely generative AI could be used to enhance of the workflow of an artist?
Oh, how I have been wrong. In reality it has only been used to replace artists. To devalue their work. It has not place in a artists pipeline.
https://aftermath.site/ai-video-game-development-art-vibe-co...
I think the use of generative AI or at least of generalist LLM's is something fundamentally different than artists embracing new media and new processes. Like digital drawing is still roughly the same process as drawing on paper. The process is largely the same and most skills carry over. You are still in control. Using a prompt to create images is something that is not drawing.
I also recommend:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1L3DaREo1sQ
Artists aren’t entitled to a job any more than I am; to the extent they (or I) do work that is easily replaced, by AI or offshoring or anything, that’s a career risk.
Those same tools enable artists to be more productive, more creative, more capable. The people suffering are those who are attached to the tools they learned with. We in tech know that’s a bad long term idea, and it is surprising in the arts. But on the whole, human creativity and overall output of great art will benefit from this change.
Listening to the studio mix on my headphones at home will always be better sound than being in a crowded concert.
I mean you are right to a certain degree, if it works, it works and if generative tools inspire you to make better music that is great. I am not so sure about that though.
I am forced to vibe code at work and it has not make me more creative. Is has made me want to quit my job.
I'm not saying you need to use generative tools, but if it helps you make music you should do it. Ultimately what you're sharing with the world is your taste, not your technical abilities. To slightly expand on a famous quote in the music world -
> I thought using AI was cheating, so I used loops. I then thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bNMxWGHlTI
Cuando para mucho mi amore de felice corazón...
I can't say anything about autogenerated lyrics.
I've found some okay but listening to "meaningless" music doesn't sit right with me
Which one are you referring to?
Right now it probably blends the styles together, taking elements from both, but not following the required restrictions.
Still not totally adherent, but if you can steer it with genre, detailed descriptions of genre, and elements of the genre it's way better than v4. Some descriptions work better than others so there's some experimentation to figure out what works for what you're trying to achieve.
You can also provide descriptions in [brackets] in the lyrics that work reasonably well in my experience.
Disclaimer: I work there as a SWE.
Some examples of style descriptions I've used that generated results close to what I had in mind are "romantic comedy intro music, fast and exciting, new york city" (aiming for something like the Sex and the City theme) and "mature adult romance reality tv show theme song, breakbeats, seductive, intimate, saxophones, lots of saxophones" which did indeed produce cheesy porn music.
-----
STYLE: Earth Circuit Fusion
INSTRUMENTATION: - Deep analog synth bass with subtle distortion - Hybrid percussion combining djembe and electronic glitches - Polytonal synth arpeggios with unpredictable patterns - Processed field recordings for atmospheric texture - Circuit-bent toys creating unexpected melodic accents
VOCAL APPROACH: - Female vocalist with rich mid-range and clear upper register - Intimate yet confident delivery with controlled vibrato - Layered whisper-singing technique in verses - Full-voiced chorus delivery with slight emotional rasp - Spoken-word elements layered under bridge melodies - Stacked fifth harmonies creating ethereal chorus quality
PRODUCTION: - Grainy tape saturation on organic elements - Juxtaposition of lo-fi and hi-fi within same sections - Strategic arrangement dropouts for dramatic impact - Glitch transition effects between sections
---
One thing I have noticed with the new model is that it listens to direction in the lyrics more now, for example [whispered] or [bass drop], etc.
There are clear limits. I have been unsuccessful in spacial arrangement.
EDIT: I realized I didn't specify, this is when you do custom and you specify the lyrics and the style separately.
For comparison, here's a song where I forced myself to do everything within Suno (took less than a week):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6mJcXxoppc
And here's one where I did the manual composition, worked with session artists, and it took a couple months and cost me several hundred dollars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5JcEnU-x3s
Or, if I'm listening to music just for the vibe, I really don't care how it's created, as long as it doesn't offend me auditorially. I'm really not listening actively. So I suppose that's a bit of an indictment of myself, but I don't think it's a serious character flaw in myself. I should probably just try to pay more attention to the people around me at all times.
I have a lot of fun putting my own poetry in here and mashing it up with the styles that I enjoy listening to, or that I think would work well with the poem. Again, I don't want to like it, but I do.
All of these example get ruined by the most simple and boring lyrics imaginable. Poetry is an art and clearly the model doesn't yet grasp all of its nuances like it does for the rest of the "composition".
At this point the only thing that gives this away as AI generated are the vocals.
Only because the bar for music is so low nowadays. Thankfully poetry hasn't been commodified yet liked music has.
>Among the stars, where the dreams and freedom meet.
>Finding the ecstasy of life’s uncharted quest,
>In every pulse of the music, feel the zest.
Like... what?
# Original record scratch contest-style song https://suno.com/s/8MvZmfkDPIPmKLtm
And this is a good example how the "magic" is lost in a cover of that same contest entry with no attempt to curate:
# v4.5 cover https://suno.com/s/KyCZZNn6PpL4JHbO
Here's another one I put a bit of time into, but with a much simpler structure. What I appreciated about the original were the emotions it stirred up when the notes came together just-so:
# Original ambient synth https://suno.com/s/JtmmbdA2VtgO4drK
New cover, pretty decent but it lost what I liked the most (haven't had great luck with v4.5 remasters yet, but I do a lot of weird things):
# v4.5 cover https://suno.com/s/Gi8wy1QjUaHmYNKy
# Original piano piece https://suno.com/s/yj8rHRRgJEWD83GY
# v4.5 remaster https://suno.com/s/Xx5Y5SNl1MdDrLsO
When you ignore the stuff that humans shouldn't get credit for - e.g. I didn't "make" this song, or play any part in its "production", but I did "curate" it - there's still something left to give credit for, right? It's basically like a DJ digging through a mysterious crate of records.
Something about music? okay. What else? Is it all fake music or something?
My reasoning is that the fact that it was made by another human is really important.
Not only because you might think a piece of music is lame because it was made by AI vs a human.
But also because all the things that bring you back to a piece of art is wrapped up in the person that made it.
People who are immense fans of the Beatles, Taylor Swift or Kanye West illustrate this point.
You keep coming back because you liked this person's music before, and so you can't wait to preorder their music in the future.
Same goes for books, paintings and really all other art I can think of.
An artist develops a following that snowballs into their music being broadly consumed.
There are "AI music artists" that have been around for a decade. Miquela is the one I know about. But in that timespan, hundreds of human artists have developed followings and cultural sway that far outweigh what Miquela has done.
It seems more and more that AI is simply another tool for humans to use. Rather than a replacement altogether of humans.
This presupposes that people are still able to tell the difference between computer-generated and human-generated music, which, in my opinion (as a trained musician and former producer), is no longer the case for the majority of people.
Music and musicians undoubtedly also fulfill an "idol function." But the industry has long since provided an answer to this, for example with highly successful, artificially optimized boy or girl groups. With "Milli Vanilli," they took it to the extreme by having the "musicians" no longer sing themselves, but were chosen solely for their effect on the audience. This also works with computer-generated music, only much cheaper.
Here's the thing about music - what makes a good song is a sense of unexpected familiarity. In other words, it's based on a set of broad, familiar rules (music theory), but surprises you by implementing those rules in a way that's extremely unique and novel. Because generative AI is kind of like an averaging machine, rounding off the outliers, what you get is an example of the rules in the most boring, typical way possible. It completely lacks the element of surprise, and I'm not sure it will ever be capable of that essential element of surprise because of how it fundamentally works. If you want to generate a bunch of background elevator music, however, this seems to be extremely useful for that.
EDIT: don't understand why this statement is downvoted; since when has HN been hostile to technology? Or if you think this is a paid bot comment, I'm real, here's my website: http://rochus-keller.ch/?cat=3
Its great, however it sucked in other languages, sounding like a foreigner trying to speak like a local.