I became aware of AI generated music a few months ago and began looking for examples. I was curious what it was like to use. This week I paid for a one month subscription to the AI music generator Suno to learn more.
I’m not going to give my views on AI generated music. At the moment I’m not really sure what I think about it. One area that I see where it could be used is as background music for YouTube videos. I expect there are lots of YouTube creators that want to stop situations where a music copyright holder takes all ad revenue when they have used a short amount of background music.
My attempts
Here are a couple of my attempts, although I don’t feel like I had much involvement. I didn’t try and improve the lyrics. I wanted to demo what it would be like when AI does all the work.
Suno provides embed code, unfortunately my blog doesn’t like it, so I’ve provided a link to Suno as well as embedding videos that I uploaded to YouTube.
The Ballad of the Clever Possum Crew
I have a son who loves Australian possums. He regularly tells me how smart they are. I thought it would be fun to have a song made about that. Suno has a lyric generator, but I used ChatGPT. I simply entered, “Can you write a song about Australian possums. This is going to be a sea shanty. Can you make it about them being smart?“
In a moment it spat out some lyrics. I pasted these into Suno and asked it to use them to make a song in sea shanty style, because sea shanty style is underrated. It generated a couple of versions, and this one came out the best. The YouTube image was created by ChatGPT.
You can also listen to it on Suno.
Bodge Wires & Shaky Hands
For the next song, I wanted it more in line with this blog. I went for the challenges of soldering SMD electronics. The prompt I entered in ChatGPT was, “Can you write a song about tinkering with electronics. Can you include bodge wires, pinging smd parts, shaky hands. make it light hearted.” I uploaded it to Suno and entered “surfing” as the style.
You can also listen to it on Suno.
A professional’s perspective
If you are interested in more, here is a video from a music professional’s perspective, Rick Beato. His video, ‘I’m Sorry…This New Artist Completely Sucks’ shows the process and how easily songs can be created with Suno. He argues they have no cultural or artistic value.
Finally
The subscription for one month was AU$12.50 (US$8.00) with the Black Friday discount. It can be used for free, but the number of songs that can be generated per day is small and only one minute of a song is generated with the latest model. Will I continue with the Suno subscription? Probably not, but I think it has been worth paying for a month, just for the learning experience.
After listening to songs created by others and the few I generated, I feel like there is something similar between many of them. It’s not something I can explain, but I think if I listen to songs, I now have a better chance of predicting if they were made by Suno or not.
If I had worked on the lyrics or even got the AI to improve them, the results wouldn’t have some of the weird lines, like “Another stole my sandwich clean—aye, right before it dropped!” and “bodge wires on the left, shaky hands on the right“. Even so the results were a lot better than I expected.
AI music won’t replace real musicians for me, but it was fun to experiment with. Now I’ve got enough credit left for this month to make about 490 songs and I’m out of ideas.
Garry's blog 
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