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.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This comment is absolutely on point. It is simply fun to listen to songs that are specific to your micro-situation, enjoy them a few times, and then life has moved on. I get it to make little ditties for our customers about how great our products are; about specific moments or events in time, or as little theme songs for projects or releases. It is delightful.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
I find it so weird that in this age of credentialism and unnecessary qualifications, most kindergarten teachers have no idea how to play the 3 chords on a ukelele which allow them to play basically every kids song and lead a singalong
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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
I guess different strokes but some of the best music I've ever been turned on to just happened to be playing in some random cafe or coffee shop. Conversely if the music is bland and uninspired I'm much less likely to go back.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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):
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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...
https://music.apple.com/au/album/breath-of-the-cosmos/175227...
https://open.spotify.com/track/0mJoJ0XiQZ8HglUdhWhg2F?si=tID...
https://suno.com/s/LHRmE867FslALzz6
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.
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
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.
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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.
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.
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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).
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edm anti-folk is also great: https://suno.com/song/47f0585c-ca41-4002-9d7f-fe71f85e0c62
it's first in one of the rows, on the left
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.
I guess different strokes but some of the best music I've ever been turned on to just happened to be playing in some random cafe or coffee shop. Conversely if the music is bland and uninspired I'm much less likely to go back.
"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.
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.
I am feeling a deja vu with that vocal part at 0:40. I definitely heard something similar somewhere.
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
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).
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
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?
https://youtu.be/_PC6jwoHyOk?si=imjfG9khOI-hsJA0
https://youtu.be/Fkf4QYTfIxA?si=j-Fo8HN59xCbteD2
Etc etc
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?)
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.
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!