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I'm interested to hear more about your statement of "Our goal is to enable more of you, not replace you." Speaking as a musician who plays real instruments (as

I'm interested to hear more about your statement of "Our goal is to enable more of you, not replace you." Speaking as a musician who plays real instruments (as opposed to electronic production): how does this help me? And how does this enable more of me? I am asking with an open mind, with no cynicism intended.

zaptrem 2y ago
If the future of music was truly just typing some text into a box and taking or leaving what the machine gives you that would be kinda depressing. We want you to be able to upload recordings of your real instruments and do all sorts of cool things with them (e.g., transform them, generate vocals for your guitar riff, use the melody as a jazz song, or just get some inspiration for what to add next). IMO AI alone will never be able to touch hearts like real people do, but people using AI will be able to like never before.
- Version467 2y ago
  Just to clarify, when you say never. Do you actually mean never (or some practical equivalent like ~100 years), or do you mean not right now, but possibly in 5-10 years? I'm just asking to try to build some intuition on what people who actually train soa models think were capabilities are heading. Either way, congrats on the launch :)
  - zaptrem 2y ago
    Never == "There will never be tears in my eyes as an AI sings ChatGPT-generated lyrics about the cycle of poverty a woman is stuck in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Car) because I know all of those experiences are made up."
    - visarga 2y ago
      The real value of AI is to be like a map, or like a mirror house, it reflects and recombines all our experiences. You can explore any mental space, travel the latent space of human culture. It is the distillation of all our intelligence, work and passion, you should show more respect and understand what it is. By treating it as if it were worthless you indirectly do the same for the training corpus, which is our heritage. If AI ever surpasses human level in art it will be more interesting to enjoy its creations than to ban it. But we're not there for now, it just imitative, it has no experiences of its own yet. But it will start having experiences as it gets deployed and used by millions, when it starts interacting with artists and art lovers in longer sessions. With each generative art session the AI can collect precious feedback targeted to its own performance. A shared experience with a human bringing complementary capabilities to its own.
    - digging 2y ago
      Assume a song comes on the radio in 3 years and you like it. How do you know it's not entirely AI-generated?
    - parpfish 2y ago
      There’s also the fact that a major component of music fandom is about the community and sense of personal identity that derives from an artist or a particular scene. Saying that you’re a big fan of a band doesn’t just mean “I like the audio they produce” but often means something much bigger about your fashion/style and personal values. How would any of that work with AI music? Is it possible to develop a community around music if everything is made on demand and nobody experiences the same songs? Will people find other like-minded music fans by recommending their favorite prompt engineers to each other?
      - zaptrem 2y ago
        Our goal is for people to continue being the ones making the music. You'll still come to our site to see XYZ's newest release, it will just be more of a collaboration with AI, similar to how artists collaborate with each other and producers right now.
  - digging 2y ago
    Personally I get very worried reading statements like "AI will never be able to do X", because they seem like obviously false statements. I think if one asserts AI will never be able to do a thing a human brain can do, that needs to be proven, rather than the other way around. For example, if we could reverse engineer the entire human neurology and build an artificial replica of it, why wouldn't we expect it to be able to do everything exactly as a human?
    - shepherdjerred 2y ago
      I don't understand those "AI will never be able to do X" statements. Surely AI will be able to do _anything_ in 1000 years. In 100 years it will almost definitely be able to replace most knowledge-based jobs. Even today it can take away many entry-level jobs, e.g. a small business no longer needs to hire someone to write a jingle, or create a logo. In 10 years, I would expect much of programming to either disappear or dramatically shift.
      - cellis 2y ago
        People who don't believe this really aren't immersed in cutting edge research. I think it could even be 5 on the extreme edge of an optimistic prediction.
        yoyohello13 2y ago
        I think people just don’t want to believe it. Because they’ve seen how people who’ve been displaced tend to be treated. This tech will cause a lot of pain.
        shepherdjerred 2y ago
        This has to be a component. It is very scary and honestly quite sad.
- anigbrowl 2y ago
  But then why are you going down the dead-end route of generating complete songs? Nobody wants this except marketing people. I've said it before, there, is no consumer market for an infinity jukebox because you can't sing along with songs you don't already know, there's already an overabundance of recorded music, and emotion in generative music (especially vocals) is fake. Nobody likes fakery for its own sake. Marketers like it because they want musical wallpaper, the same way commercials have it and it increasingly seeps into 'news' coverage. The market for fully-generated songs is background music in supermarkets, product launch videos, and in-group entertainment ('original songs for your company holiday party! Hilarious musical portraits of your favorite executives - us!'). If you want to innovate in this area (and you should, your diffusion model sounds interesting), make an AI band that can accompany solo musicians. Prioritize note data rather than fully produced tracks (you can have an AI mix engineer as well as an AI bass player or drummer). Give people tools to build something in stages and they'll get invested in it. People want interactivity, not a slot machine. Many musicians love sequencers, arpeggiators, chord generators, and other musical automata; what they don't love is a magic 8-ball that leaves themw ith nothing to do and makes them feel uncreative. Otherwise your product will just end up on the cultural scrapheap, associated with lowest-common denominator fakers spamming social media as is already happening with imagery.
  - bongodongobob 2y ago
    I've essentially been running an infinity jukebox for the last week. I save the ones I like and relisten. Simple as that. Edit: It's been interesting watching non-musicians argue about emotion in music. I don't care who you are, the 300th time you perform a song, you're faking it to a large degree. People see musicians as these iconic, deep, geniuses, but most of us are just doing our job. You don't get excited about the 300th boilerplate getter and setter just like we aren't super excited about playing some song for the 300th time. It's a performance. It's pretend. A musician singing is like an actor performing. It's not as real as you think it is.
    - parpfish 2y ago
      But emotion was (most likely) involved when you wrote or first recorded the song, and that’s what people connect with. If you go to a concert and you hear the headliner play a love ballad followed up by a breakup song, you don’t expect them to actually be going through those emotions in real time.
- chefandy 2y ago
  > If the future of music was truly just typing some text into a box and taking or leaving what the machine gives you that would be kinda depressing. Hm... From my vantage point, it seems like a pretty weird choice of businesses if you think that. > IMO AI alone will never be able to touch hearts like real people do, but people using AI will be able to like never before. That's all very heartwarming but musicianship is also a profession, not just a human expression of creativity. Even if you're not charging yet, you're a business and plan on profiting from this, right? It seems to me that: 1) Generally, if people want music currently, they pay for musician-created music, even if its wildly undervalued in venues like streaming services. 2) You took music, most of which people already paid musicians to create and they aren't getting paid any more because of this, and you used it to make an automated service that people will be able to pay for music instead of paying musicians. 3) Your service certainly doesn't hurt, and might even enhance people's ability to write and perform music without considering the economics of doing so. For example, hobbyists. 4) So you're not trying to replace musicians making music with people typing in prompts-- you're trying to replace musicians being paid to make music with you being paid to make music. Right? Your business isn't replacing musicianship as a human art form, but for it to succeed, it will have to replace it, in some amount, as a profession, right? Unless you are planning on creating an entirely new market for music, fundamentally, I'm not sure how it couldn't. Am I wrong on the facts, here? If so, well hey, this is capitalism and that's just how it works around here. If I'm mistaken, I'd like to hear how. Regardless, this is very consequential to a lot of people, and they deserve the people driving these changes to be upfront about it-- not gloss over it.
- manibatra 2y ago
  Love what you are doing but "never" is just not true. Used Suno to create a song about our daughter the other day which had wife and I in tears. We are already at a stage where AI is touching hearts.
  - zaptrem 2y ago
    That's no longer AI alone, you gave it the needed touch of humanity! That touch will take many different forms for different people.
LZ_Khan 2y ago
Inspiration? You can generate hundreds of ideas in a day. The tracks will not be perfect but that's where actual musicians can take the ideas/themes from the tracks and perfect it. In this way it is a tool only useful to expert musicians.
- jimmyjazz14 2y ago
  I mean if you want inspiration there are literally millions of amazing songs on Spotify by real musicians. I have yet to hear an AI composed song that was in the least bit musically inspiring.
  - zimmund 2y ago
    Well, it's a starting point for songwriters. We won't get amazing solos and clever mind-bending lyrics (yet?). One thing I love about these AI music generators is that you can take the exact same lyrics and hear them in a lot of different styles and melodies. That's something that I'd struggle with. Can you easily imagine the happy birthday song with different melodies and rythms? These tools won't create the next bop, but they can seed back ideas to musicians, while people without music skills can have fun creating songs about the things they like.
  - LZ_Khan 2y ago
    You can't do that for any well-known song without running into copyright lawsuits for even the slightest similarity. These AI songs can generate novel tracks, so it's likely one can get away with a lot more. Whether or not the tracks are truly novel is up for debate, but if you generate 500 tracks, there's going to be some very very usable and obscure melodies in there. And you will be able to rip these melodies verbatim, with low-risk of copyright infringement.
suyash 2y ago
That is just 'marketing speak' so as long you are their customers, they need to make money from users who will be using their service to make music.
93po 2y ago
When Suno came out I spent literally hours/days playing around with it to generate music, and came out with some that's really close to good, and good enough I've gone back to listen to a few. I'd love the tooling to take a premise and be able to tweak it to my liking without spending 1000 hours learning specific software and without thousands of hours learning to play an instrument or learning to sing.
- yoyohello13 2y ago
  I just don’t get this. Part of the joy of creating things is the work I put in. The easier something is to make, the less meaning it has to me. I feel like just asking a machine to make a bunch of songs is kind of meaningless.
  - inhumantsar 2y ago
    people used to say the exact same thing about DJs and later Apple's GarageBand. if the person is spending time tweaking the prompt, which in this system includes BPM, musical style, writing lyrics, and they get a song they like out of it, how is that meaningless? how is that any different from strapping loops together in GarageBand instead of learning to play the guitar or drums?
    - vunderba 2y ago
      I mean, there's still a huge difference between somebody who buys a bunch of loop packs and just glues them together versus somebody who can sit down at the piano, improvise a new melody and then build an arrangement around it.
whoomp12341 2y ago
same thing with AI code writing. Its a good muse, but I wouldn't trust what it makes out of the gate

zaptrem 2y ago

If the future of music was truly just typing some text into a box and taking or leaving what the machine gives you that would be kinda depressing. We want you to be able to upload recordings of your real instruments and do all sorts of cool things with them (e.g., transform them, generate vocals for your guitar riff, use the melody as a jazz song, or just get some inspiration for what to add next). IMO AI alone will never be able to touch hearts like real people do, but people using AI will be able to like never before.

Version467 2y ago
Just to clarify, when you say never. Do you actually mean never (or some practical equivalent like ~100 years), or do you mean not right now, but possibly in 5-10 years? I'm just asking to try to build some intuition on what people who actually train soa models think were capabilities are heading. Either way, congrats on the launch :)
- zaptrem 2y ago
  Never == "There will never be tears in my eyes as an AI sings ChatGPT-generated lyrics about the cycle of poverty a woman is stuck in (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Car https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Car) because I know all of those experiences are made up."
  - visarga 2y ago
    The real value of AI is to be like a map, or like a mirror house, it reflects and recombines all our experiences. You can explore any mental space, travel the latent space of human culture. It is the distillation of all our intelligence, work and passion, you should show more respect and understand what it is. By treating it as if it were worthless you indirectly do the same for the training corpus, which is our heritage. If AI ever surpasses human level in art it will be more interesting to enjoy its creations than to ban it. But we're not there for now, it just imitative, it has no experiences of its own yet. But it will start having experiences as it gets deployed and used by millions, when it starts interacting with artists and art lovers in longer sessions. With each generative art session the AI can collect precious feedback targeted to its own performance. A shared experience with a human bringing complementary capabilities to its own.
  - digging 2y ago
    Assume a song comes on the radio in 3 years and you like it. How do you know it's not entirely AI-generated?
  - parpfish 2y ago
    There’s also the fact that a major component of music fandom is about the community and sense of personal identity that derives from an artist or a particular scene. Saying that you’re a big fan of a band doesn’t just mean “I like the audio they produce” but often means something much bigger about your fashion/style and personal values. How would any of that work with AI music? Is it possible to develop a community around music if everything is made on demand and nobody experiences the same songs? Will people find other like-minded music fans by recommending their favorite prompt engineers to each other?
    - zaptrem 2y ago
      Our goal is for people to continue being the ones making the music. You'll still come to our site to see XYZ's newest release, it will just be more of a collaboration with AI, similar to how artists collaborate with each other and producers right now.
- digging 2y ago
  Personally I get very worried reading statements like "AI will never be able to do X", because they seem like obviously false statements. I think if one asserts AI will never be able to do a thing a human brain can do, that needs to be proven, rather than the other way around. For example, if we could reverse engineer the entire human neurology and build an artificial replica of it, why wouldn't we expect it to be able to do everything exactly as a human?
  - shepherdjerred 2y ago
    I don't understand those "AI will never be able to do X" statements. Surely AI will be able to do _anything_ in 1000 years. In 100 years it will almost definitely be able to replace most knowledge-based jobs. Even today it can take away many entry-level jobs, e.g. a small business no longer needs to hire someone to write a jingle, or create a logo. In 10 years, I would expect much of programming to either disappear or dramatically shift.
    - cellis 2y ago
      People who don't believe this really aren't immersed in cutting edge research. I think it could even be 5 on the extreme edge of an optimistic prediction.
      - yoyohello13 2y ago
        I think people just don’t want to believe it. Because they’ve seen how people who’ve been displaced tend to be treated. This tech will cause a lot of pain.
        shepherdjerred 2y ago
        This has to be a component. It is very scary and honestly quite sad.
anigbrowl 2y ago
But then why are you going down the dead-end route of generating complete songs? Nobody wants this except marketing people. I've said it before, there, is no consumer market for an infinity jukebox because you can't sing along with songs you don't already know, there's already an overabundance of recorded music, and emotion in generative music (especially vocals) is fake. Nobody likes fakery for its own sake. Marketers like it because they want musical wallpaper, the same way commercials have it and it increasingly seeps into 'news' coverage. The market for fully-generated songs is background music in supermarkets, product launch videos, and in-group entertainment ('original songs for your company holiday party! Hilarious musical portraits of your favorite executives - us!'). If you want to innovate in this area (and you should, your diffusion model sounds interesting), make an AI band that can accompany solo musicians. Prioritize note data rather than fully produced tracks (you can have an AI mix engineer as well as an AI bass player or drummer). Give people tools to build something in stages and they'll get invested in it. People want interactivity, not a slot machine. Many musicians love sequencers, arpeggiators, chord generators, and other musical automata; what they don't love is a magic 8-ball that leaves themw ith nothing to do and makes them feel uncreative. Otherwise your product will just end up on the cultural scrapheap, associated with lowest-common denominator fakers spamming social media as is already happening with imagery.
- bongodongobob 2y ago
  I've essentially been running an infinity jukebox for the last week. I save the ones I like and relisten. Simple as that. Edit: It's been interesting watching non-musicians argue about emotion in music. I don't care who you are, the 300th time you perform a song, you're faking it to a large degree. People see musicians as these iconic, deep, geniuses, but most of us are just doing our job. You don't get excited about the 300th boilerplate getter and setter just like we aren't super excited about playing some song for the 300th time. It's a performance. It's pretend. A musician singing is like an actor performing. It's not as real as you think it is.
  - parpfish 2y ago
    But emotion was (most likely) involved when you wrote or first recorded the song, and that’s what people connect with. If you go to a concert and you hear the headliner play a love ballad followed up by a breakup song, you don’t expect them to actually be going through those emotions in real time.
chefandy 2y ago
> If the future of music was truly just typing some text into a box and taking or leaving what the machine gives you that would be kinda depressing. Hm... From my vantage point, it seems like a pretty weird choice of businesses if you think that. > IMO AI alone will never be able to touch hearts like real people do, but people using AI will be able to like never before. That's all very heartwarming but musicianship is also a profession, not just a human expression of creativity. Even if you're not charging yet, you're a business and plan on profiting from this, right? It seems to me that: 1) Generally, if people want music currently, they pay for musician-created music, even if its wildly undervalued in venues like streaming services. 2) You took music, most of which people already paid musicians to create and they aren't getting paid any more because of this, and you used it to make an automated service that people will be able to pay for music instead of paying musicians. 3) Your service certainly doesn't hurt, and might even enhance people's ability to write and perform music without considering the economics of doing so. For example, hobbyists. 4) So you're not trying to replace musicians making music with people typing in prompts-- you're trying to replace musicians being paid to make music with you being paid to make music. Right? Your business isn't replacing musicianship as a human art form, but for it to succeed, it will have to replace it, in some amount, as a profession, right? Unless you are planning on creating an entirely new market for music, fundamentally, I'm not sure how it couldn't. Am I wrong on the facts, here? If so, well hey, this is capitalism and that's just how it works around here. If I'm mistaken, I'd like to hear how. Regardless, this is very consequential to a lot of people, and they deserve the people driving these changes to be upfront about it-- not gloss over it.
manibatra 2y ago
Love what you are doing but "never" is just not true. Used Suno to create a song about our daughter the other day which had wife and I in tears. We are already at a stage where AI is touching hearts.
- zaptrem 2y ago
  That's no longer AI alone, you gave it the needed touch of humanity! That touch will take many different forms for different people.

LZ_Khan 2y ago

Inspiration? You can generate hundreds of ideas in a day. The tracks will not be perfect but that's where actual musicians can take the ideas/themes from the tracks and perfect it. In this way it is a tool only useful to expert musicians.

jimmyjazz14 2y ago
I mean if you want inspiration there are literally millions of amazing songs on Spotify by real musicians. I have yet to hear an AI composed song that was in the least bit musically inspiring.
- zimmund 2y ago
  Well, it's a starting point for songwriters. We won't get amazing solos and clever mind-bending lyrics (yet?). One thing I love about these AI music generators is that you can take the exact same lyrics and hear them in a lot of different styles and melodies. That's something that I'd struggle with. Can you easily imagine the happy birthday song with different melodies and rythms? These tools won't create the next bop, but they can seed back ideas to musicians, while people without music skills can have fun creating songs about the things they like.
- LZ_Khan 2y ago
  You can't do that for any well-known song without running into copyright lawsuits for even the slightest similarity. These AI songs can generate novel tracks, so it's likely one can get away with a lot more. Whether or not the tracks are truly novel is up for debate, but if you generate 500 tracks, there's going to be some very very usable and obscure melodies in there. And you will be able to rip these melodies verbatim, with low-risk of copyright infringement.

suyash 2y ago

That is just 'marketing speak' so as long you are their customers, they need to make money from users who will be using their service to make music.

93po 2y ago

When Suno came out I spent literally hours/days playing around with it to generate music, and came out with some that's really close to good, and good enough I've gone back to listen to a few. I'd love the tooling to take a premise and be able to tweak it to my liking without spending 1000 hours learning specific software and without thousands of hours learning to play an instrument or learning to sing.

yoyohello13 2y ago
I just don’t get this. Part of the joy of creating things is the work I put in. The easier something is to make, the less meaning it has to me. I feel like just asking a machine to make a bunch of songs is kind of meaningless.
- inhumantsar 2y ago
  people used to say the exact same thing about DJs and later Apple's GarageBand. if the person is spending time tweaking the prompt, which in this system includes BPM, musical style, writing lyrics, and they get a song they like out of it, how is that meaningless? how is that any different from strapping loops together in GarageBand instead of learning to play the guitar or drums?
  - vunderba 2y ago
    I mean, there's still a huge difference between somebody who buys a bunch of loop packs and just glues them together versus somebody who can sit down at the piano, improvise a new melody and then build an arrangement around it.

whoomp12341 2y ago

same thing with AI code writing. Its a good muse, but I wouldn't trust what it makes out of the gate