In March, we saw the launch of a “ChatGPT for music” called Suno, which uses generative AI to produce realistic songs on demand from short text prompts. A few weeks later, a similar competitor – Udio – arrived on the scene.
I’ve been working with various creative computational tools for the past 15 years, both as a researcher and a producer, and the recent pace of change has floored me. As I’ve argued elsewhere, the view that AI systems will never make “real” music like humans do should be understood more as a claim about social context than technical capability.
The argument “sure, it can make expressive, complex-structured, natural-sounding, virtuosic, original music which can stir human emotions, but AI can’t make proper music” can easily begin to sound like something from a Monty Python sketch.
After playing with Suno and Udio, I’ve been thinking about what it is exactly they change – and what they might mean not only for the way professionals and amateur artists create music, but the way all of us consume it.
Expressing emotion without feeling it
Generating audio from text prompts in itself is nothing new. However, Suno and Udio have made an obvious development: from a simple text prompt, they generate song lyrics (using a ChatGPT-like text generator), feed them into a generative voice model, and integrate the “vocals” with generated music to produce a coherent song segment.
This integration is a small but remarkable feat. The systems are very good at making up coherent songs that sound expressively “sung” (there I go anthropomorphizing).
The effect can be uncanny. I know it’s AI, but the voice can still cut through with emotional impact. When the music performs a perfectly executed end-of-bar pirouette into a new section, my brain gets some of those little sparks of pattern-processing joy that I might get listening to a great band.
To me this highlights something sometimes missed about musical expression: AI doesn’t need to experience emotions and life events to successfully express them in music that resonates with people.
Music as an everyday language
Like other generative AI products, Suno and Udio were trained on vast amounts of existing work by real humans – and there is much debate about those humans’ intellectual property rights.
Nevertheless, these tools may mark the dawn of mainstream AI music culture. They offer new forms of musical engagement that people will just want to use, to explore, to play with and actually listen to for their own enjoyment.
Source: https://studyfinds.org/ai-can-now-generate-entire-songs-on-demand-generative-music/