It’s not perfect (especially: I can’t figure out how to get it to create a song of the correct length, so I had to cut and paste snippets from two songs into a playlist, and that creates audible glitches/issues at the beginning, middle, and end) but overall I’m full of wonder and appreciation.
one data-point: i have been generating songs with lyrics I like and it’s most of my music consumption now.
the song you generated has a slop vibe i am not a fan of—but we are all wireheaded in different ways. however, if I generate hundreds of songs I usually get what I want. focusing on simple lyrics helps a lot and “no autotune” in the prompt helps too.
Really like the song! Best AI generation I’ve heard so far. Though I might be biased since I’m a fan of Kipling’s poetry: I coincidentally just memorised the source poem for this a few weeks ago, and also recently named my blog after a phrase from Hymn of Breaking Strain (which was already nicely put to non-AI music as part of Secular Solstice).
I noticed you had added a few stanzas of your own:
As the Permian Era ended,
we were promised a Righteous Cause, To fight against Oppression or
take back what once was ours.
But all the Support for our Troops
didn’t stop us from losing the war
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings
said “Be careful what you wish for.”
In Scriptures old and new, we
were promised the Good and the True
By heeding the Authorities
and shunning the outcast few But our bogeys and solutions
were as real as goblins and elves
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings
said “Learn to think for yourselves.”
Kipling’s version has a particular slant to which vices it disapproves of, so I appreciate the expansion. The second stanza is great IMO, but the first stanza sounds a bit awkward in places. I had some fun messing with it:
As the Permian Era ended, we were promised the Righteous Cause. In the fight against Oppression, we could ignore our cherished Laws, Till righteous rage and fury made all rational thought uncouth. And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said “The crowd is not the truth”
If this is representative of the kind of music you like, I think you’re wildly overestimating how difficult it is to make that music.
The hard parts are basically infrastructural (knowing how to record a sound, how to make different sounds play well together in a virtual space). Suno is actually pretty bad at that, though, so if you give yourself the affordance to be bad at it, too, then you can just ignore the most time-intensive part of music making.
Pasting things together (as you did here), is largely The Way Music Is Made in the digital age, anyway.
I think, in ~one hour you could:
Learn to play the melody of this song on piano.
Learn to use some randomizer tools within a DAW (some of which may be ML-based), and learn the fundamentals of that DAW, as well as just enough music theory to get by (nothing happening in the above Suno piece would take more than 10 minutes of explanation to understand).
The actual arrangement of the Suno piece is somewhat ambitious (not in that it does anything hard, just in that it has many sections), but this was the part you had to hack together yourself anyway, and getting those features in a human-made song is more about spending the time to do it, than it is about having the skill (there is a skill to doing an awesome job of it, but Suno doesn’t have that skill either).
Suno’s outputs are detectably bad to me and all of my music friends, even the e/acc or ai-indifferent ones, and it’s a significant negative update for me on the broader perceptual capacities of our community that so many folks here prefer Suno to music made by humans.
I agree it’s not perfect. It has the feel of… well, the musical version of what you get with AI-generated images, where your first impression is ‘wow’ and then you look more closely and you notice all sorts of aberrant details that sour you on the whole thing.
I think you misunderstood me if you think I prefer Suno to music made by humans. I prefer some Suno songs to many songs made by humans. Mainly because of the lyrics—I can get Suno songs made out of whatever lyrics I like, whereas most really good human-made songs have insipid or banal lyrics about clubbing or casual sex or whatever.
Only the first few sections of the comment were directed at you; the last bit was a broader point re other commenters in the thread, the fooming shoggoths, and various in-person conversations I’ve had with people in the bay.
That rationalists and EAs tend toward aesthetic bankruptcy is one of my chronic bones to pick, because I do think it indicates the presence of some bias that doesn’t exist in the general population, which results in various blind spots.
Sorry for not signposting and/or limiting myself to a direct reply; that was definitely confusing.
I think you should give 1 or 2 a try, and would volunteer my time (although if you’d find a betting structure more enticing, we could say my time is free iff I turn out to be wrong, and otherwise you’d pay me).
It is interesting; I am only a half musician but I wonder what a true musician think about the music generation quality generally; also this reminds me of the Silicon Valley show’s music similarity tool to check for copyright issues; that might be really useful nowadays lmao
A great many tools like this already exist and are contracted by the major labels.
When you post a song to streaming services, it’s checked against the entire major label catalog before actually listing on the service (the technical process is almost certainly not literally this, but it’s something like this, and they’re very secretive about what’s actually happening under the hood).
I’m no musician, but music-generating AIs are already way better than I could ever be. It took me about an hour of prompting to get Suno to make this: https://suno.com/playlist/34e6de43-774e-44fe-afc6-02f9defa7e22
It’s not perfect (especially: I can’t figure out how to get it to create a song of the correct length, so I had to cut and paste snippets from two songs into a playlist, and that creates audible glitches/issues at the beginning, middle, and end) but overall I’m full of wonder and appreciation.
one data-point: i have been generating songs with lyrics I like and it’s most of my music consumption now.
the song you generated has a slop vibe i am not a fan of—but we are all wireheaded in different ways. however, if I generate hundreds of songs I usually get what I want. focusing on simple lyrics helps a lot and “no autotune” in the prompt helps too.
I’ve been playing around with Suno, inspired by this Rob Long Tweet: https://x.com/rgblong/status/1857233734640222364
I’ve been pretty shocked at how easily it makes music that I want to listen to (mainly slightly cringe midwest emo): https://suno.com/song/1a5a1edf-9711-4ca4-a2f7-ef814ca298b4
Really like the song! Best AI generation I’ve heard so far. Though I might be biased since I’m a fan of Kipling’s poetry: I coincidentally just memorised the source poem for this a few weeks ago, and also recently named my blog after a phrase from Hymn of Breaking Strain (which was already nicely put to non-AI music as part of Secular Solstice).
I noticed you had added a few stanzas of your own:
Kipling’s version has a particular slant to which vices it disapproves of, so I appreciate the expansion. The second stanza is great IMO, but the first stanza sounds a bit awkward in places. I had some fun messing with it:
If this is representative of the kind of music you like, I think you’re wildly overestimating how difficult it is to make that music.
The hard parts are basically infrastructural (knowing how to record a sound, how to make different sounds play well together in a virtual space). Suno is actually pretty bad at that, though, so if you give yourself the affordance to be bad at it, too, then you can just ignore the most time-intensive part of music making.
Pasting things together (as you did here), is largely The Way Music Is Made in the digital age, anyway.
I think, in ~one hour you could:
Learn to play the melody of this song on piano.
Learn to use some randomizer tools within a DAW (some of which may be ML-based), and learn the fundamentals of that DAW, as well as just enough music theory to get by (nothing happening in the above Suno piece would take more than 10 minutes of explanation to understand).
The actual arrangement of the Suno piece is somewhat ambitious (not in that it does anything hard, just in that it has many sections), but this was the part you had to hack together yourself anyway, and getting those features in a human-made song is more about spending the time to do it, than it is about having the skill (there is a skill to doing an awesome job of it, but Suno doesn’t have that skill either).
Suno’s outputs are detectably bad to me and all of my music friends, even the e/acc or ai-indifferent ones, and it’s a significant negative update for me on the broader perceptual capacities of our community that so many folks here prefer Suno to music made by humans.
I agree it’s not perfect. It has the feel of… well, the musical version of what you get with AI-generated images, where your first impression is ‘wow’ and then you look more closely and you notice all sorts of aberrant details that sour you on the whole thing.
I think you misunderstood me if you think I prefer Suno to music made by humans. I prefer some Suno songs to many songs made by humans. Mainly because of the lyrics—I can get Suno songs made out of whatever lyrics I like, whereas most really good human-made songs have insipid or banal lyrics about clubbing or casual sex or whatever.
Only the first few sections of the comment were directed at you; the last bit was a broader point re other commenters in the thread, the fooming shoggoths, and various in-person conversations I’ve had with people in the bay.
That rationalists and EAs tend toward aesthetic bankruptcy is one of my chronic bones to pick, because I do think it indicates the presence of some bias that doesn’t exist in the general population, which results in various blind spots.
Sorry for not signposting and/or limiting myself to a direct reply; that was definitely confusing.
I think you should give 1 or 2 a try, and would volunteer my time (although if you’d find a betting structure more enticing, we could say my time is free iff I turn out to be wrong, and otherwise you’d pay me).
It is interesting; I am only a half musician but I wonder what a true musician think about the music generation quality generally; also this reminds me of the Silicon Valley show’s music similarity tool to check for copyright issues; that might be really useful nowadays lmao
A great many tools like this already exist and are contracted by the major labels.
When you post a song to streaming services, it’s checked against the entire major label catalog before actually listing on the service (the technical process is almost certainly not literally this, but it’s something like this, and they’re very secretive about what’s actually happening under the hood).
Yeah nice; I heard youtube also has something similar for checking videos as well