And then comes Suno (and OpenAI's jukebox before that), and it felt like my brain exploded... like the classic scene in a superhero movie when the power was given to me. Is my music good? No - but I spent years writing and fashioning poetry and all of a sudden can put that to music... hard to explain how awesome that feels. and i love using the tools and it's getting better and it's been fundamentally empowering. I know it's easy to say generative art is generative swill... but "learning Suno" is no different than "learning guitar".
It's a pretty absurd claim to say that learning Suno is no different than learning a musical instrument. My 8 year old nephew was cranking out "songs" in Suno within an hour of being introduced to it. Reminds me of when parents were super impressed that their 3-year old could use an iPad.
Generative tools (visual, auditory, etc.) can serve as powerful tools of augmentation for existing creators. For example, you've put together a song (melody/harmony) and you'd like to have AI fill out a simple percussive section to enrich everything.
However with a translation as vast as "text" -> to -> "music" in terms of medium - you can't really insert much of yourself into a brand new piece outside of the lyrics though I'd wager 99% of Suno users are too lazy to even do that themselves. I suppose you can act as a curator reviewing hundreds of generated pieces but that's a very different thing.
I always get a little confused when I hear non-musicians say that something like Suno is empowering when all they did was type in, "A Contrapuntal hurdy-gurdy fugue with a backing drum track performed by a man who swallowed too many turquoise beads doing the truffle shuffle while a choir gives each other inappropriate friendly tickles".
You imply "it is Prompt -> Song" but in reality it is "Prompt -> Song -> Reflection -> New Prompt -> New Song.." It is a dialogue. And in a dialogue you can get some places where neither of you could go alone.
As software developers we know that multiple people contribute to a project, inside a git repo, and if you take one's work out it does nothing useful by itself. Only when they come together they make sense. What one dev writes builds on what other devs write. It's recursive dependency.
The interaction between human and AI can take a similar path. It's not a push-button vending machine for content. It is like a story writing itself, discovering where it will end up along the way. The credit goes to the process, not any one in isolation.
Controlling that flow of generation, re-prompting, adjusting, splicing, etc. to create a unique song that expresses your intention is significantly more work and requires significantly more creativity. The more you understand this “instrument”, the more accurate and efficient you become.
What you’re comparatively suggesting is that if a producer were to grab samples off Splice, slice them and dice them to rearrange them and make a unique song, that they didn’t “actually” make music. That seems like it would be a more absurd position than suggesting AI could be viewed as an instrument.
Tools like Suno make people feel like “their own music” is good and they have accomplished something because they elevate the floor of being bad at a tool (like all technological improvements do). They feel like they have been able to express their creativity and are proud, like a kid showing off a doodle. They share it with their friends, who will listen to it exactly one time in most cases and likely tell them it is “really good” and they “really like it” before never listening again.
That type of AI use is akin to a coloring book, but certainly doesn’t make for “good” music. When a kid shows off their badly colored efforts proudly, should we yell at them they aren’t doing “real art”, that their effort was meaningless, and that they should stop acting proud of such crap until they go to art school and do it “properly”?
It most definitely is different and you’ve proven it with your own post. Guitar takes a long time to get to a place where you can produce the sounds you hear in your head. Suno gives you instant gratification.
Look, if it gives you pleasure to make Suno music then you should do it, but if you think having an ai steal a melody and add it to your songs counts is the same as creating something, you’re kiddo by yourself. At best you are a lyricist relying on a robocomposer to do the hard part. You could have achieved the same thing years ago by collaborating with a musician like Bernie Taupin did with Elton John.
There are drawbacks to being a skilled (trained/practiced) musician. You specialize in one instrument, and tend to have your creativity guided by its strengths/weaknesses.
I think that soon, some very accomplished musicians will learn to leverage tools like Suno, but they aren't in the majority yet. We're still in the "vibe-coding" phase of AI music generation.
We saw this happen with CG. When it started, engineers did most of the creating, and we got less-than-stellar results[0].
Then, CG became its own community and vocation, and true artists started to dominate.
Some of the CG art that I see nowadays, is every bit as impressive as the Great Masters.
We'll see that, when AI music generation comes into its own. It's not there, yet.
Wrong. It takes extremely long before you can make the sounds in your head fit into the scale and recognize them, however with Suno it is impossible.
I would compare Suno to a musician-for-hire. You describe what you want, some time later he sends you the recording, you write clarifications, and get second revision, and so on. Suno is the same musician, except much faster, cheaper and with poor vocal skills. Everything you can do with Suno today, you could make before, albeit at much higher price.
The fact people still think this is how these models work is astonishing
Even if that were true, sampling is an artform and is behind one of the most popular and succesful genres today (hip hop). So is DJ'ing or is that also not a skill?
The same puritanism that claimed jazz wasn't music, then rap wasn't music, then EDM wasn't music, blah blah
Gatekeepers of what is and isn't art always end up wrong and crotchety on the other side. It's lame and played out.
What an insanely disrespectful take.
No it absolutely is not.
all the discourse with this remark is quite fascinating as an observer. similar remarks used to be said about electronic music or just use of conventional daw when they were new.
to those who have dedicated years into their craft: one must not mix self-expression from the mechanics of getting there. it is very respectable to dedicate one's life to the analogue way. but if something lets you get there in a different way, allow it.
But we might need new vocabulary to differentiate that from the act of learning & using different layers of musical theory + physical ability on an instrument (including tools like supercollider) + your lived experience as a human to produce music.
Maybe some day soon all the songs on the radio and Spotify will be ai generated and hyper personalized and we’ll happily dance to it, but I’ll bet my last dollar that as long as humans exist, they’ll continue grinding away (manually?) at whatever musical instrument of the time.
You may wish that learning Suno is no different than learning guitar, but I think the effects of AI may be a bit pernicious, and lead to a stagnation that takes a while to truly be felt. Nobody can say one way or the other yet. That said, I'm happy you can make music that you enjoy, and that Suno enables you to do it. Such tools are at their best when they're helping people like you.
Of course, nothing wrong with watching and appreciating a master at work. It’s just when this is sold as the illusion of education passively absorbed through a screen that I think it can be harmful. Or at least a waste of time.
You downplay the training it takes to actually use your body to output the notes. With the guitar your fingers have to "learn" as much as your brain on a scale that no prompt input will ever match. And I say that as a musician that use mostly sequencers to compose.
>> think that soon, some very accomplished musicians will learn to leverage tools like Suno, but they aren't in the majority yet. We're still in the "vibe-coding" phase of AI music generation. We saw this happen with CG. When it started, engineers did most of the creating, and we got less-than-stellar results[0]. Then, CG became its own community and vocation, and true artists started to dominate.
Hey its likely not going to be me, but let's be real - any user of this technology who has gone beyond the "type in a prompt and look i got a silly song about poop" stage will probably agree - someone's going to produce some bangers using this tech. It's inevitable and if you don't think so it's likely you haven't done anything more than "low-effort" work on these platforms. "Low effort" work - which a majority of AI swill us - is going to suck, whether its AI or not.
And while I have the forum, I do want to make another point. I pay more for a month for Suno than Spotify ($25 vs $9). Suno/Udio etc: do what you need to to make sure the artists and catalogues are getting compensated... as an user I would pay even more knowing that was settled.
Ehh... No.
So, this songeater guy, what a poser eh?
It either needs to be: 1. So easy anyone can press a button and magically get exactly what they want with perfect accuracy and quality. 2. So robust and powerful it enables new kinds of music production and super-charges human producers.
This is neither. And I don't buy Suno's argument that they're solving a real problem here. Creative people don't hate the process of creating art-- it's the process itself and the personal expression that make it worthwhile. And listeners/consumers can tell the difference between art created with intent and soul, and a pale imitation of that.
Don't forget the secret third option - facilitate a tidal wave of empty-calorie content which saturates every avenue for discovery and "wins" purely by drowning everything else out through sheer volume. We're at the point where some genAI companies are all but admitting that's their goal.
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/ai-podcas...
That way I get new musical ideas from Suno but without any trace of Suno in the final output. Suno's output, even with the v5 model, is never quite what I want anyway so this way makes most sense to me. Also it means there's no Suno audio watermarking in the final product.
It shouldn't be a magic button that does everything for you, removing the human element. A human consciously making decisions with intent, informed by life experience, to share a particular perspective, is what makes art art.
Yep. I was a professional music producer before the pandemics, and I couldn't agree more.
Honestly, I'm glad we are destroying every way possible to earn money with music, so we find another profession for that purpose and then we can make music for fun and love again.
Strong disagree there. I think that's true of a very small % of consumers nowadays. I mean, total honesty, I think that Suno is not worse than a large fraction of the commercial pop made by humans (maybe) that tops the charts regularly. It's already extremely formula based artificial music made by professional hit makers from Sweden or Korea.
The objective was never to grab discerning listeners but the mass of people. It would work even if they grab 50% but honestly I think it's going to be higher.
But then you look at image gen. The established one, namely Adobe, are surprisingly not winning the AI race.
Then you look at code gen. The established IDEs are doing even worse.
I don't rule out the possibility of music being truly special, but the idea of "established tools can just easily integrate AI right" isn't universally true.
What Adobe and others ought to be doing is setting up internal labs that have free reign to explore whatever ideas they want, with no barriers or formality. I doubt any of them will do that.
I'd argue music generation is different from image or code generation. It's closer to being purely art. Take image generation for example. Most of the disruption is coming from competition with graphic design, marketing, creative/production processes, etc. The art world isn't up in arms about AI "art" competing with human art.
Respectfully I disagree. We have had curated, manufactured pop, built by committee and sung by pretty mouthpieces with no emotional connection, for a long time now, and they make big money.
And look at the vocaloid stuff too.
Those who care, care. Everyone else?
they can be (albeit web-based) the "davinci resolve" of DAW, regardless of whether the AI features be bundled away for the paid plans.
Um, have you seen the pop charts at any time in the past... well, since forever, actually?
The majority of commercially produced music today is created with intent to take your money and nothing else, with performers little more than actors lip-syncing to the same tired beat. Because it sells.
I mean, I hate when it's difficult to get the medium to express my vision... not that AI especially would help with that when I'm actually attached to that vision in detail....
This is the first time I'm actually paying for generated AI content because the value I get is immense. I really think we are headed towards and over supply of content where there will be more stuff to read, watch, listen with very real value in all of them.
This spells out the inevitable change in the labor market for content creators. There will always be value for human created content and some will make more money but it will always have the AI generated content generation competing with it to the point where it will be hard to stay ahead and eventually people will stop caring.
Case in point, I see some comments being snarkish towards Suno but for as a consumer I could care less if you put your soul and years into producing art vs the one I can get a lot of today and now especially when there is virtually no difference in quality.
Truly an amazing accomplishment from Suno team, and probably the first time I've subbed to a music service after decades of downloading mp3s, hunting down new songs to listen to on Youtube. Suno 'steamified" this process and while I will use youtube to discover new genre, I am spending now most of my time in Suno, listening to endless amount of the exact sound I am looking for.
a quantity over quality argument with regard to art is wild.
as a fellow consumer I care a lot actually
We're already here with human created content.
I was very impressed with v4.5+ that I could get quite good songs evocative of Devo, Yeah Yeah Yeah's, Metric, etc.
Version 5 is currently harder (or I haven't figured out a way) to generate this kind of chopped/produced sound. It doesn't follow complex style definitions and tends to generate songs that are too slow and "smoothed" over.
> my favorite genre is new jack swing
My friend, where do you think your favorite genre that AI is now parroting comes from…
I just haven't heard anything that isn't "slopful" yet. If I do, I will still feel weird about it, but I'm a big believer in the value of "aesthetic objects in themselves", so I am eager to find something I do actually like.
Even just knowing something was drawn or composed by an AI will negatively taint my opinion from the start, but I'm still open.
They give users (players?) a sense of agency, making it satisfying. But in reality, you're no more composing than a guitar-hero player is playing the guitar, and nor will you learn how to from doing so. No matter how sophisticated the transformations in an LLM, you're ultimately using other people's music in a sophisticated mashup game.
However, in guitar hero, the people's who's music was being used at least got royalties. :-/
Ge Wang (professor in my field) wrote a great article on why LLMs are so uninteresting from a musical perspective. https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ge-wang-genai-art-is-the-least...
Suno can create catchy songs and succeed in matching genre expectations / cliches.
I've been in phases where I had output I generated with it playing in my head constantly (due to repeated listening).
The output was catchy.
Then tried to generate interesting music, failed spectacularly.
And I, among other stuff, enjoy a lot of music that people consider formulaic, abstract or straight-up boring.
What's missing in AI "art" is intent and well... creativity.
I think it will have a disrupting influence on commercial pop culture, no question.
I also wouldn't claim to be able to classify correctly whether something is AI output.
But art is something entirely different.
I'm not going to claim AI audio isn't also awash with popular themes and tropes, or that it's a bastion of creativity. I'm also not going to claim that the deepest, really creative ideas aren't expressed in human written works. There are enough people to make truly exceptional songs and prompt many truly mindless AI generations. And there's also nothing wrong with most songs optimizing for personal preferences that are not that; I'm not trying to 'argue against' popular music.
But I am going to claim, for me, that it just hasn't been practical to saturate my tastes from public media, and that most of the reason I personally listen to AI music is that I want something that says or does something I think is creative, exploratory, or intellectually interesting that I don't know how to get from anywhere else.
You can upload music and let suno arrange it in different styles. I'm a musician myself and am also interested in "interesting" music. I made experiments with my own music and was positively surprised by the "musicality" and creativity of the generated arrangements (https://rochus-keller.ch/?p=1350).
I've actually had a lot of fun using tools like Suno/Udio as a means of sonic exploration to see how some of my older compositions would sound in different mediums.
When I composed this piece of classical music practically a decade ago, it was intended for strings but at the time I only played piano so that's where it stayed. By increasing the "Audio Influence Slider", Suno arranged it in a chamber quartet style but stayed nearly 1:1 faithful with the original in terms of melody / structure.
Comparison blog piece
One thing that's interesting about the AI violin cover is that I'm not sure those runs would be physically possible at that speed on a real violin. So that composition can _only_ be played digitally, I believe.
When I used to do larger more orchestral arrangements, I was constantly getting dinged by the instrumentalists that while they were theoretically musically possible, certain runs or passages were very unnatural on the instrument that I scored them on.
For a long time I really hoped that some of the more professional notation tools such as finale would add in an ability to analyze passages and determine how realistic/natural they were for the instrument that they were set to.
If you want to test it, here's the link: https://www.submithub.com/ai-song-checker
Much like those of us hammering away at LLMs who eventually get incredible results through persistence, people are doing the same with these other AI tools, creating in an entirely new way.
I'm sure Suno are working hard on this and these AI tools can only come together as fast as we can figure out the UX for all this stuff, but I'm holding out for when I can guide the music with specific melodies using voice or midi.
For "conventional" musicians, we (or at least I) would love to have that level of control. Often we know exactly what it should sound like, but might not have session musicians or expensive VSTs (or patience) on hand to get exactly the sound we want. Currently we make do with what we have - but this tech could allow many to take their existing productions to the next level.
This is basically what all the Suno creations sound like to me, which is to say they definitely have a market, but that market isn't for people who have a more than average interest in music.
Sunscreen: https://youtu.be/VBaWtOHPTZw
Purple Sunset Over Lake 2: https://youtu.be/lD7rSxPncs4
What people miss is since the creation of Splice, basically all new music that isn’t from an already established artist is paint by numbers. You can get any sample in any key that are given to splice by artists. You probably hear a lot of the same sounds in most modern music. This breaks that open.
The Suno team has been doing this exactly right and this is just another step in their evolution.
Major congrats to the product team for this, I can’t wait to see the next iteration!
Yup totally won't mess with their algorithms.
For voice removal I use Ultimate Vocal Track Remover, is on Github.
I wonder how AI-assisted music production like Suno will change the profession of being a musician. I think people want their favorite music artists to be real humans they can relate to. For that reason, I guess real singers won't be out of a job anytime soon. The same may apply to performers of real musical instruments. No one wants to see music played entirely from a computer during a live concert.
However, I predict that it will be very difficult to become even moderately well-known as a musician by just being a Suno Studio creator alone. A lot of good-sounding content will be created this way, and if an artist can't perform live or doesn't have a unique persona or story to attract an audience, it'll be hard to stand out from the endless mass of AI-generated content.
Tomorrowland begs to differ
However I do care that the person who created the music made hundreds of micro decisions during the creation of the piece such that it is coherent, has personality and structure towards the goal of satisfying that individuals sense of aesthetics. Unsurprisingly this is not something you get from current AI generated music.
But for cases where music is the primary product, I don’t for see AI generated music overtaking anything
- extracting melody/instrument from a clip to be able to edit the notes and render it back with the same instrument
- extracting and reordering stems in a drum clip
- fixing timing and cleaning noise from sloppily played guitar melody
- generating high-quality multi-mic instrument samples for free
- AI checking the melody and pointing out which notes are wrong or boring and how it can be fixed. I want to write the notes myself but help would be very useful.
- AI helping to build harmony (pick chords for the melody for example)
This would help a lot, but current models that generate a song without any controls, are not what I want.
I wonder how they trained the model to generate clips, did they hire lot of musicians to record the samples, or just scraped multiple commercial instrument libraries without permission?
LOL oh hell no! Why would anyone use this if a perpetual subscription is required to maintain the rights? Absurd.
> If you made your songs while subscribed to a Pro or Premier plan, those songs are covered by a commercial use license.
More info here: https://help.suno.com/en/articles/2410177
I tried to sample a few songs generated by others, but I can't find their appeal.
Looks like the "covers" need some better instrument isolation, but this is really huge for the music industry.
I've played around with Suno for a couple of months. It works for some things, but to me - it just doesn't give any sense of...accomplishment? I'd much rather sit down with my instruments, and come up with the stuff myself.
What is more, I get no feel of ownership. It is not me that's making music, I'm just feeding it prompts. That's it.
It's like paying some painter 5 bucks, and telling them what to paint. In the end, you'll have your painting, but you didn't paint it.
With that said, these tools have their uses. Generating jingles and muzak is easier than ever.
AI is a shortcut from an idea to something that resembles your idea in solid form. If your goal is to create something and get a sense of accomplishment from that creative act then AI will never work for you because the artistic process is exactly what the AI shortcut is short-cutting around.
On the other hand, that AI shortcut is circumventing decades of practice, so if you're at the start and you just want the output so you can use it in some way it's awesome.
With Suno, using your audio uploads to effectively 'filter' your ideas into something usable, compositing in the DAW, and putting a full song together -- that's going to be a much different experience than "make me a song"
That didn’t stop Andy Warhol from becoming a famous artist.
What does that mean? It means that your compositions (outside of bouncing them down to audio stems) exists within a highly proprietary SaaS format and that the moment you stop paying, you've got NOTHING.
99% of major DAWs (Ableton, Logic, FL Studio, Bitwig, Studio One, etc.) are a perpetual license.
For example, I had never heard epic power metal about birds, but with Suno I got exactly what I wanted. Sure, the sound quality (I only used v3.5) could be better and the songs could be longer, but I don’t care, I now have epic songs about my Bourke’s parakeet. However, I’m not pretentious enough to think those songs are interesting to anyone other than my wife and me, hence the smallness of the bubble.
Generating ‘content’ tailored to you and not meant for someone else’s taste.
Human artists need to make money and those who create music for a tiny bubble probably can’t make enough.
So as an artist what do you do? Do you have to create music with mass market appeal from the beginning?
Or do you need to bank on luck that your music for ‘small bubbles’ gets discovered?
Or you have to have clever marketing strategies to get your music in front of more ears to hopefully gain more fans. And create merch, tour etc.
I wonder how all this AI music is going to impact indie artists. Spotify and the likes is just ripping them off and on top of that their music is / has been stolen from these AI data gobblers.
I don’t see how at this stage it can replace human expression though (singing, playing violin, piano, etc) which is very nuanced.
Same with acting… nuanced expressions that matter. I’m not sure AI can replicate the acting skills of Denise Gough (Dedra from Andor) for example… and many others.
But it would be awesome to generate more story lines or episodes from your favourite TV shows, for example shows from over 20 years ago.
Imagine being able to create more episodes of Star Trek TNG or DS9, maintaining the feel of that era without letting someone like Kurtzmann ruin and tell you how new Star Trek should be.
But how do you ensure actors, writers and other creatives from that show will be compensated directly?
Or maybe this will only be possible in a Star Trek like world, where profit uber alles is not the focus anymore.
Why do we continue to prop up these companies when there are ethical alternatives? We are rapidly replacing all experts with AI trained in their data, and all the money goes to the AI companies. It should be intuitively obvious this isn’t good.
Is it snobby of me to look down upon art that is created using these tools as lesser because the human did not make every tiny decision going into a peice? That a persons taste and talent is no longer fully used to produce something and for someone reason to me what is what makes the art impressive and meaningful?
Something about art with imperfections still feels exciting, maybe even more so than if I see something that is perfect but if I see an AI gen picture with 6 fingers, I just write it all off as slop.
I am happy to allow my generated code to come from “training data” but I see the use of AI in art, writing and music as using stolen artists hard work.
I feel like as time goes on, I feel even more conflicted about it all.
You either adapt or go hungry just like everybody else and art shouldn't be exempt from the mechanics of supply and demand.
Take, for example, a track by Fontaines D.C., a band from Ireland that writes extensively about the lived social and political experience. Knowing where they are from and the general themes of their work makes their tracks feel authentic, and you can appreciate the worldview they have and the time spent producing the art, even if it does not align with your own tastes.
Trying to create something of the same themes and quality from a prompt of “make me an Irish pop rock track about growing up in the country” suddenly misses any authenticity.
Maybe this is what I am trying to get at, but like I said, I feel some conflict about this, as I personally value these tools for productivity
> That a persons taste and talent is no longer fully used to produce something and for someone reason to me what is what makes the art impressive and meaningful?
Human output isn't sacred. yes this is snobbery, a useless feeling of superiority.
Yes. But aesthetic taste and snobbery usually go hand in hand.
Suno 6 should solve those issues.
