6 ms·

These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. I think as they get better at making these great middle of the road

by navane 3y ago

These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. I think as they get better at making these great middle of the road songs, edgy music will reemerge. Whatever AI will be good at, will immediately devalue, in the realm of arts. Just how photography gave way to non-realistic art and how drum machines made sloppy drums (or ridiculous apex twins) hip. Then, the artifacts we see now as flaws will create its own sub genre. So I see three ways this flows: mediocrity will be even more available, which will make artists who make mediocare music even less succesfull, pushing all human music further in human direction, except those using the unwanted artifacts of this new tech to create new sub genres. Music, art, fashion is in the end all about changes. What we make now mostly means something in relation to what was already there. It's a big conversation, spanning millenia, and this isn't the last word.

amelius 3y ago
Elevator music ... Hmm, perhaps there is a business model there: an elevator that writes music about the people inside the elevator, and adapts as the situation changes.
- wjnc 3y ago
  Instant dystopia Custom audio and video advertising based on profiling and location Looking at my spam folder what my world will look like then
  - corobo 3y ago
    My immediate thought too when I heard this one from that other AI music app that was on the front page yesterday. It's a description (Wikipedia intro by the looks) of Cola, but could easily be droning on about Coca Cola specifically while you're stuck in a lift. https://sonauto.ai/songs/rsNs3yET01kQrFGiT1qS https://sonauto.ai/songs/rsNs3yET01kQrFGiT1qS We're gonna need adblock enabled earbuds soon lol
  - nicbou 3y ago
    "Where do you want to go for lunch?" [song slowly morphs into popular restaurant chain theme]
  - squarefoot 3y ago
    No need for AI or face recognition to do that: BT equipped system in elevator detects phones through their Bluetooth Device Address (sort of MAC address for BT), then calls a central repository of names to pair that phone with an identity, DNS style, then calls an advertising seller (for example, Google) that will happily give back the appropriate ads according to target, time, location and context. Or, in a even more dystopian and much simpler scenario: some system app in the phone detects a beacon in the elevator through the above Device Address, then calls home (again, Google and others) and receives the ads to be shown in the elevator (or any other place with a audio/video system plus BT).
- LadyCailin 3y ago
  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Un_oHaf798 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Un_oHaf798
- birracerveza 3y ago
  Let's not. Unless you want the AI equivalent of this Family Guy sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZvWvfCSZ8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZvWvfCSZ8M
  - ohwellhere 3y ago
    That wasn’t even the Family Guy sketch I was thinking of! “Red-headed lady, gonna eat an apple. She breathes on it first, wipes it on her bloooouuuuse…”
- bsza 3y ago
  That could be very wholesome, but I doubt anyone would be willing to operate an unsupervised real-time generative AI that sings to random people.
- raddan 3y ago
  You’ll enjoy this: https://hitchhikersguidetoearth.fandom.com/wiki/Sirius_Cybernetics_Corporation https://hitchhikersguidetoearth.fandom.com/wiki/Sirius_Cyber...
- cm2187 3y ago
  I go full dystopian. Elevator music that delivers your compliance trainings in the corporate world...
  - kgabis 3y ago
    And requires you to sing-along to reach desired floor.
    - syockit 3y ago
      Sounds like a skit from Bourniston.
    - ryandrake 3y ago
      Same, but with ads instead. Sing "mountain dew is for me and you" to get to your floor.
  - mensetmanusman 3y ago
    https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/983286-4chan https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/983286-4chan
dotancohen 3y ago
> drum machines made sloppy drums (or ridiculous apex twins) hip. Other than The White Stripes, what popular bands have had clearly unskilled drummers? I actually enjoy listening to more amateur music, so this might be a request for recommendations of a sort.
- kvdveer 3y ago
  "Sloppy drums" != "Unskilled drummer". Maybe sloppy isn't the best term here. More like not being beat-perfect. E.g. using slightly off-beat hits or slight tempo variation as a way to emphasize other instruments or lyrics. Pre drum computers these changes would more likely have been considered to be sloppy drumming, whereas these are more likely to signal authenticity these days.
  - smackeyacky 3y ago
    Don Henley was sloppy. Always a fraction of a beat behind. It turned out to be something of a hook in Eagles songs
    - smrq 3y ago
      "Always" implies not sloppy; sloppy playing would be sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, but unpredictable amounts. I should know, I'm a sloppy drummer ;)
- SubGenius 3y ago
  > Other than The White Stripes, what popular bands have had clearly unskilled drummers? I want to joke and say Lars from Metallica but I'd be lying. He was a decent drummer in the first couple albums.
- dumb1224 3y ago
  Simpler Rhythms could be made creative. I am not a drummer or expert in researching popular bands but e.g The Ting Tings have a very interesting rhythm section.
- zeitg3ist 3y ago
Valakas_ 3y ago
>These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. Yet. This is the worst it will ever be. Enjoy.
fluentbyfire 3y ago
Only on Hacker News could people find flaws with such an awesome idea and execution. Not all songs have hooks or refrains. Only the most formulaic ones.
- wasteduniverse 3y ago
  [dead]
- whstl 3y ago
  I don't think it's fair to conflate "having structure" with "being formulaic". Even the most abstract art is not about splashing paint in a canvas and calling it a day. It's about doing something close to this, but creatively and within a specific framework. It takes much more skill to produce songs with hooks and refrains than to produce random music. But it takes even more skill to produce something that is creative, not formulaic, but still has some structure that's pleasant/fun/interesting/etc to the listener.
  - immibis 3y ago
    The second best art of this time will always remain "who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?" after it inspired such fear in someone that they sliced it up with a knife.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fps_doug 3y ago
> These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. I've been playing around with it for a few days now. While I agree that it seems impossible to create songs with a more "sophisticated structure" (for lack of a better word off the top of my head), you still can get better results by fine-tuning, as is always the case. If you just request "rock music" or "jazz", you get very dull, generic variants of the requested style. But on a second thought, isn't that exactly what should happen? You throw all the rock music on this planet in a blender, turn it on, and what you get is the most average rock music there is. If you spend some time spicing up your prompt with flowery language or just a bunch of adjectives, you can get a sound that seems less bland. When you supply lyrics, using square brackets to denote verses, chorus and bridges can also result in a somewhat more structured song, but I found that the AI is pretty lackluster in that regard and you often need several attempts until it follows these inline orders. So yes, in its current form it has mostly a novelty factor, this is Stable Diffusion for music, but I can easily see this being useful for a small indie gamedev who needs some BGM, or an alternative to the YouTube music library. Instrumental sounds fine, it's mostly vocals that have this clear digital distortion if you pay attention. It's surprisingly good, but still bad.
- RantyDave 3y ago
  It does a very convincing Finnish death metal.
- ragazzina 3y ago
  >it seems impossible to create songs with a more "sophisticated structure" Is it my impression, or if you just put: [verse] .. .. [chorus] .. .. it works mostly OK?
- navane 3y ago
  Oh wow, that worked pretty well: https://suno.com/song/a82f064a-54e3-4317-b331-f0993726d702 https://suno.com/song/a82f064a-54e3-4317-b331-f0993726d702 The melody of the instrumental pre-chorus is repeated consistently, and it's even used as the hook in the chorus; the pre-chorus is actually building up to the chorus. I'm impressed.
plufz 3y ago
> pushing all human music further in human direction Might also just push us in the direction of less good music, if you can’t make any money as a musician before you are a genius.
jchook 3y ago
> These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. Perhaps this has more to do with the input rather than the capability of the AI. The license is somewhat meandering. Also, there is a neat build-up to the ALL CAPS portion, when the song takes on a much more full and powerful quality. Plus the whisper on (the "Software"). It's obviously responding well to the features of the input itself.
throwaway143829 3y ago
Your comment seems to presume that AI will not get any better than it is now. Imagine an AI that understands how to create deep, impactful music better than humans do, because it understands how music works at a biochemical level. Imagine it can even predict the dynamics you're describing, about employing "unwanted artifacts" in the music as a way to evolve new genres. It would no longer need to create such obviously derivative works at that point, and it could generate music that sounds completely unique to us. It may take a long time to reach that point, but when it does, the kinds of music that it generates won't be able to be dismissed so easily.
- Voultapher 3y ago
  Your comment seems to presume that the line between what a human is and what an AI is will stay clear. I'm predicting that this line will be increasingly blurry. Some people see smartphones as cybernetic extensions. When I call someone across the globe, did I do that or my phone? Is that a capability I posses or my phone? Does it make sense to separate the two? Even if AI gets way better, the one thing that I don't foresee changing is what makes things valuable and or desirable. Sparsity. If everyone has it or can create it, it's not special. I think the GP was referring to this sparsity.
  - fennecfoxy 3y ago
    You're talking about agency there I think. No your phone didn't do that, you did. However, if later down the line we create autonomous agents that can initiate the creation of said music themselves then I'd call that enough agency to say that the machine is "making music". Could probably almost do it now; tailored LLMs, image diffusion, music diffusion and you could have an ML agent that acts as a musical artist; posts to instagram etc with images of their persona "working on something new", releasing new tracks, bantering, etc. There are already AI OF stars apparently. We could say "yeah but a human still set it up and told it to make music" but I would discount that; pretty sure no human has total agency, we are all impacted by our environment, peers, culture and all sorts of other external influences. And I don't think sparsity changes things (maybe in the material world) but culture certainly does. Things are popular because they appeal to us in bulk, rarity/sparsity always result in higher effort for the payoff and so decreases popularity.
guardian5x 3y ago
"mediocrity will be even more available" - so basically all the stuff that is in the top 100 charts will be more available
memsom 3y ago
This is your comment as a song: https://suno.com/song/c974b1ca-c69e-47a9-994c-9172fae52927 https://suno.com/song/c974b1ca-c69e-47a9-994c-9172fae52927
- oblio 3y ago
  If they didn't require an account to be able to create a song, I would have started an epic AI song battle right here and and right now :-p
  - memsom 3y ago
    You know what else you can do... google an existing song and copy the lyrics then make it make a version. It is HILARIOUS! https://suno.com/song/52a61a54-e25b-438a-908e-01074e6b75fa/ https://suno.com/song/52a61a54-e25b-438a-908e-01074e6b75fa/
- navane 3y ago
  Thank you!
fennecfoxy 3y ago
Idk I've managed to generate some good-ish ones getting it to generate the lyrics itself as well: A smelly wolf: https://suno.com/song/c2b30ffc-729f-405b-8f22-b1b5f36a7c6a https://suno.com/song/c2b30ffc-729f-405b-8f22-b1b5f36a7c6a Trying to get a lid off a jar: https://suno.com/song/44562993-df45-4b56-939b-afd65832042f https://suno.com/song/44562993-df45-4b56-939b-afd65832042f Two people that are too different for each other: https://suno.com/song/c63c82fe-399a-41b8-91b2-f16911deaaf0 https://suno.com/song/c63c82fe-399a-41b8-91b2-f16911deaaf0 Vocaloid robot whose code is incompatible with love: https://suno.com/song/fbb51ff7-3f69-41b0-9d41-7f6b5f6a5d87 https://suno.com/song/fbb51ff7-3f69-41b0-9d41-7f6b5f6a5d87 (I want to do something more with the hook in this one "Heartbeat system, can you teach me to feel?" was touching) An AI achieves sentience: https://suno.com/song/3eee76bd-2313-423f-87e3-035566b4718c https://suno.com/song/3eee76bd-2313-423f-87e3-035566b4718c Mushroom psytrance: https://suno.com/song/a785adf8-92dd-4b13-acb7-93beb44ab7b2 https://suno.com/song/a785adf8-92dd-4b13-acb7-93beb44ab7b2 Kernel panic dubstep: https://suno.com/song/5d37f5e7-3e62-4df8-a1d8-67122470aeff https://suno.com/song/5d37f5e7-3e62-4df8-a1d8-67122470aeff Neuromancer: https://suno.com/song/d2705c66-4be5-496c-add1-480427b4a005 https://suno.com/song/d2705c66-4be5-496c-add1-480427b4a005 I mean it's definitely not perfect, but as per 2 minute papers "only one year later..."
- downboots 3y ago
  Make a singing quine
latentsea 3y ago
You can make them have a hook if you structure it right. The default prompt on Suno winds up as "verse, verse 2, chorus" for the structure, which indeed does sort of sound like a song, but not a song at the same time. When I changed things around and put a chorus in twice I wound up getting an actual song with a hook. I assume the 2 minute limit has a lot to do with this. Often I find Suno generates anywhere between 40 seconds to 2 minutes, with the shorter generations having less of a recognizable structure as a song. If instead it was 3 to 4 minutes, I think it'd be radically different.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  Yeah I have noticed that Suno's lyric generation is very canned sometimes, but also for timing - it oftens generates 3-4 (longish) lines for a verse where for the music there should be 2-3.
  - gwern 3y ago
    That's the ChatGPT style. It is extremely stereotypical when it comes to writing lyrics or poetry: 4 lines, rhyming, with metronome regularity. Both Suno & Udio seem to use ChatGPT for lyrics, and it's a terrible choice, which should be ripped out in favor of Claude or anything else. (Basically, any LLM which can pass the "write a non-rhyming poem" test prompt would be a better choice.)
latexr 3y ago
> These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. Isn’t that a consequence of the pasted text, which itself doesn’t repeat? I checked their homepage and clicked the #1 trending song. It has notation regarding the chorus and verses and the melody does repeat. https://suno.com/song/c15f0251-fbac-4a30-a3e1-002dbc78cb79/ https://suno.com/song/c15f0251-fbac-4a30-a3e1-002dbc78cb79/
twobitshifter 3y ago
This is suno, udio was just released which is even better and seems to exhibit some edginess. https://x.com/minchoi/status/1778074187778683253?s=46 https://x.com/minchoi/status/1778074187778683253?s=46 This will be used for jingles and scoring by low cost studios and marketers. Making money at music was already hard and will only get harder. But maybe this makes sense in a way, music creation just became much easier and accessible to more people. Alongside this prompt based music creation, we have AI powered autotune and voice masking, which allows even the worst singers to sing perfectly. Popular music was already being retuned during recording and this just makes it easier. In hip hop, old songs beats and verses are getting reused wholesale with little to no modification. See Jack Harlow’s First Class and Tyga’s Bops Goin Brazy. A lot of musical success is now business connections, studio promotion and timing, not being extraordinarily talented. Most rappers now don’t write lyrics down or freestyle, they record a line, pause, record another line, pause , erase the last one, rerecord, and then they’re done. This type of thing an LLM is made for. I think this means less works of art on the ‘radio’ and more garbage music forcefed by studios.
- postalrat 3y ago
  I tried udio a bit yesterday and found it produces clearer audio but the music it produces isn't nearly as good as suno. At least to my ear.
j-pb 3y ago
Have you tried annotating the lyrics with stuff like (hook), (chorus), e.t.c. I've used chatgpt to generate the lyrics for a random word, while giving it some artist names to draw inspiration from and suno manages to put in most of the appropriate musical characteristic of the annotated segments. Most notably (chorus) and outro (outro) in this example: https://suno.com/song/23e1d6de-569c-4c19-9551-cfda8e1bcd5a https://suno.com/song/23e1d6de-569c-4c19-9551-cfda8e1bcd5a
mjgoeke 3y ago
We're already there! Impose some structure in the textual representation of the song and it'll respect the structure musically: example - "I only ate 3 cheeseburgers" https://suno.com/song/c15f0251-fbac-4a30-a3e1-002dbc78cb79/ https://suno.com/song/c15f0251-fbac-4a30-a3e1-002dbc78cb79/ edit: yes, I agree this example amusingly reinforces the rest of what parent is saying
- stusmall 3y ago
  I know it isn't the point you are trying to make, but I can't think of a better way to re-enforce OP's point of "mediocrity will be even more available" than a mid-00s style, pop country song about eating hamburgers. "Toby Keith but with less to say" might be the gold standard of mediocrity.

by navane 3y ago

amelius 3y ago

Elevator music ... Hmm, perhaps there is a business model there: an elevator that writes music about the people inside the elevator, and adapts as the situation changes.

wjnc 3y ago
Instant dystopia Custom audio and video advertising based on profiling and location Looking at my spam folder what my world will look like then
- corobo 3y ago
  My immediate thought too when I heard this one from that other AI music app that was on the front page yesterday. It's a description (Wikipedia intro by the looks) of Cola, but could easily be droning on about Coca Cola specifically while you're stuck in a lift. https://sonauto.ai/songs/rsNs3yET01kQrFGiT1qS https://sonauto.ai/songs/rsNs3yET01kQrFGiT1qS We're gonna need adblock enabled earbuds soon lol
- nicbou 3y ago
  "Where do you want to go for lunch?" [song slowly morphs into popular restaurant chain theme]
- squarefoot 3y ago
  No need for AI or face recognition to do that: BT equipped system in elevator detects phones through their Bluetooth Device Address (sort of MAC address for BT), then calls a central repository of names to pair that phone with an identity, DNS style, then calls an advertising seller (for example, Google) that will happily give back the appropriate ads according to target, time, location and context. Or, in a even more dystopian and much simpler scenario: some system app in the phone detects a beacon in the elevator through the above Device Address, then calls home (again, Google and others) and receives the ads to be shown in the elevator (or any other place with a audio/video system plus BT).
LadyCailin 3y ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Un_oHaf798 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1Un_oHaf798
birracerveza 3y ago
Let's not. Unless you want the AI equivalent of this Family Guy sketch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZvWvfCSZ8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XZvWvfCSZ8M
- ohwellhere 3y ago
  That wasn’t even the Family Guy sketch I was thinking of! “Red-headed lady, gonna eat an apple. She breathes on it first, wipes it on her bloooouuuuse…”
bsza 3y ago
That could be very wholesome, but I doubt anyone would be willing to operate an unsupervised real-time generative AI that sings to random people.
raddan 3y ago
You’ll enjoy this: https://hitchhikersguidetoearth.fandom.com/wiki/Sirius_Cybernetics_Corporation https://hitchhikersguidetoearth.fandom.com/wiki/Sirius_Cyber...
cm2187 3y ago
I go full dystopian. Elevator music that delivers your compliance trainings in the corporate world...
- kgabis 3y ago
  And requires you to sing-along to reach desired floor.
  - syockit 3y ago
    Sounds like a skit from Bourniston.
  - ryandrake 3y ago
    Same, but with ads instead. Sing "mountain dew is for me and you" to get to your floor.
- mensetmanusman 3y ago
  https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/983286-4chan https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/983286-4chan

dotancohen 3y ago

> drum machines made sloppy drums (or ridiculous apex twins) hip. Other than The White Stripes, what popular bands have had clearly unskilled drummers? I actually enjoy listening to more amateur music, so this might be a request for recommendations of a sort.

kvdveer 3y ago
"Sloppy drums" != "Unskilled drummer". Maybe sloppy isn't the best term here. More like not being beat-perfect. E.g. using slightly off-beat hits or slight tempo variation as a way to emphasize other instruments or lyrics. Pre drum computers these changes would more likely have been considered to be sloppy drumming, whereas these are more likely to signal authenticity these days.
- smackeyacky 3y ago
  Don Henley was sloppy. Always a fraction of a beat behind. It turned out to be something of a hook in Eagles songs
  - smrq 3y ago
    "Always" implies not sloppy; sloppy playing would be sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, but unpredictable amounts. I should know, I'm a sloppy drummer ;)
SubGenius 3y ago
> Other than The White Stripes, what popular bands have had clearly unskilled drummers? I want to joke and say Lars from Metallica but I'd be lying. He was a decent drummer in the first couple albums.
dumb1224 3y ago
Simpler Rhythms could be made creative. I am not a drummer or expert in researching popular bands but e.g The Ting Tings have a very interesting rhythm section.
zeitg3ist 3y ago

Valakas_ 3y ago

>These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. Yet. This is the worst it will ever be. Enjoy.

fluentbyfire 3y ago

Only on Hacker News could people find flaws with such an awesome idea and execution. Not all songs have hooks or refrains. Only the most formulaic ones.

wasteduniverse 3y ago
[dead]
whstl 3y ago
I don't think it's fair to conflate "having structure" with "being formulaic". Even the most abstract art is not about splashing paint in a canvas and calling it a day. It's about doing something close to this, but creatively and within a specific framework. It takes much more skill to produce songs with hooks and refrains than to produce random music. But it takes even more skill to produce something that is creative, not formulaic, but still has some structure that's pleasant/fun/interesting/etc to the listener.
- immibis 3y ago
  The second best art of this time will always remain "who's afraid of red, yellow and blue?" after it inspired such fear in someone that they sliced it up with a knife.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fps_doug 3y ago

> These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. I've been playing around with it for a few days now. While I agree that it seems impossible to create songs with a more "sophisticated structure" (for lack of a better word off the top of my head), you still can get better results by fine-tuning, as is always the case. If you just request "rock music" or "jazz", you get very dull, generic variants of the requested style. But on a second thought, isn't that exactly what should happen? You throw all the rock music on this planet in a blender, turn it on, and what you get is the most average rock music there is. If you spend some time spicing up your prompt with flowery language or just a bunch of adjectives, you can get a sound that seems less bland. When you supply lyrics, using square brackets to denote verses, chorus and bridges can also result in a somewhat more structured song, but I found that the AI is pretty lackluster in that regard and you often need several attempts until it follows these inline orders. So yes, in its current form it has mostly a novelty factor, this is Stable Diffusion for music, but I can easily see this being useful for a small indie gamedev who needs some BGM, or an alternative to the YouTube music library. Instrumental sounds fine, it's mostly vocals that have this clear digital distortion if you pay attention. It's surprisingly good, but still bad.

RantyDave 3y ago
It does a very convincing Finnish death metal.
ragazzina 3y ago
>it seems impossible to create songs with a more "sophisticated structure" Is it my impression, or if you just put: [verse] .. .. [chorus] .. .. it works mostly OK?
navane 3y ago
Oh wow, that worked pretty well: https://suno.com/song/a82f064a-54e3-4317-b331-f0993726d702 https://suno.com/song/a82f064a-54e3-4317-b331-f0993726d702 The melody of the instrumental pre-chorus is repeated consistently, and it's even used as the hook in the chorus; the pre-chorus is actually building up to the chorus. I'm impressed.

plufz 3y ago

> pushing all human music further in human direction Might also just push us in the direction of less good music, if you can’t make any money as a musician before you are a genius.

jchook 3y ago

> These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. Perhaps this has more to do with the input rather than the capability of the AI. The license is somewhat meandering. Also, there is a neat build-up to the ALL CAPS portion, when the song takes on a much more full and powerful quality. Plus the whisper on (the "Software"). It's obviously responding well to the features of the input itself.

throwaway143829 3y ago

Your comment seems to presume that AI will not get any better than it is now. Imagine an AI that understands how to create deep, impactful music better than humans do, because it understands how music works at a biochemical level. Imagine it can even predict the dynamics you're describing, about employing "unwanted artifacts" in the music as a way to evolve new genres. It would no longer need to create such obviously derivative works at that point, and it could generate music that sounds completely unique to us. It may take a long time to reach that point, but when it does, the kinds of music that it generates won't be able to be dismissed so easily.

Voultapher 3y ago
Your comment seems to presume that the line between what a human is and what an AI is will stay clear. I'm predicting that this line will be increasingly blurry. Some people see smartphones as cybernetic extensions. When I call someone across the globe, did I do that or my phone? Is that a capability I posses or my phone? Does it make sense to separate the two? Even if AI gets way better, the one thing that I don't foresee changing is what makes things valuable and or desirable. Sparsity. If everyone has it or can create it, it's not special. I think the GP was referring to this sparsity.
- fennecfoxy 3y ago
  You're talking about agency there I think. No your phone didn't do that, you did. However, if later down the line we create autonomous agents that can initiate the creation of said music themselves then I'd call that enough agency to say that the machine is "making music". Could probably almost do it now; tailored LLMs, image diffusion, music diffusion and you could have an ML agent that acts as a musical artist; posts to instagram etc with images of their persona "working on something new", releasing new tracks, bantering, etc. There are already AI OF stars apparently. We could say "yeah but a human still set it up and told it to make music" but I would discount that; pretty sure no human has total agency, we are all impacted by our environment, peers, culture and all sorts of other external influences. And I don't think sparsity changes things (maybe in the material world) but culture certainly does. Things are popular because they appeal to us in bulk, rarity/sparsity always result in higher effort for the payoff and so decreases popularity.

guardian5x 3y ago

"mediocrity will be even more available" - so basically all the stuff that is in the top 100 charts will be more available

memsom 3y ago

This is your comment as a song: https://suno.com/song/c974b1ca-c69e-47a9-994c-9172fae52927 https://suno.com/song/c974b1ca-c69e-47a9-994c-9172fae52927

oblio 3y ago
If they didn't require an account to be able to create a song, I would have started an epic AI song battle right here and and right now :-p
- memsom 3y ago
  You know what else you can do... google an existing song and copy the lyrics then make it make a version. It is HILARIOUS! https://suno.com/song/52a61a54-e25b-438a-908e-01074e6b75fa/ https://suno.com/song/52a61a54-e25b-438a-908e-01074e6b75fa/
navane 3y ago
Thank you!

fennecfoxy 3y ago

Idk I've managed to generate some good-ish ones getting it to generate the lyrics itself as well: A smelly wolf: https://suno.com/song/c2b30ffc-729f-405b-8f22-b1b5f36a7c6a https://suno.com/song/c2b30ffc-729f-405b-8f22-b1b5f36a7c6a Trying to get a lid off a jar: https://suno.com/song/44562993-df45-4b56-939b-afd65832042f https://suno.com/song/44562993-df45-4b56-939b-afd65832042f Two people that are too different for each other: https://suno.com/song/c63c82fe-399a-41b8-91b2-f16911deaaf0 https://suno.com/song/c63c82fe-399a-41b8-91b2-f16911deaaf0 Vocaloid robot whose code is incompatible with love: https://suno.com/song/fbb51ff7-3f69-41b0-9d41-7f6b5f6a5d87 https://suno.com/song/fbb51ff7-3f69-41b0-9d41-7f6b5f6a5d87 (I want to do something more with the hook in this one "Heartbeat system, can you teach me to feel?" was touching) An AI achieves sentience: https://suno.com/song/3eee76bd-2313-423f-87e3-035566b4718c https://suno.com/song/3eee76bd-2313-423f-87e3-035566b4718c Mushroom psytrance: https://suno.com/song/a785adf8-92dd-4b13-acb7-93beb44ab7b2 https://suno.com/song/a785adf8-92dd-4b13-acb7-93beb44ab7b2 Kernel panic dubstep: https://suno.com/song/5d37f5e7-3e62-4df8-a1d8-67122470aeff https://suno.com/song/5d37f5e7-3e62-4df8-a1d8-67122470aeff Neuromancer: https://suno.com/song/d2705c66-4be5-496c-add1-480427b4a005 https://suno.com/song/d2705c66-4be5-496c-add1-480427b4a005 I mean it's definitely not perfect, but as per 2 minute papers "only one year later..."

downboots 3y ago
Make a singing quine

latentsea 3y ago

You can make them have a hook if you structure it right. The default prompt on Suno winds up as "verse, verse 2, chorus" for the structure, which indeed does sort of sound like a song, but not a song at the same time. When I changed things around and put a chorus in twice I wound up getting an actual song with a hook. I assume the 2 minute limit has a lot to do with this. Often I find Suno generates anywhere between 40 seconds to 2 minutes, with the shorter generations having less of a recognizable structure as a song. If instead it was 3 to 4 minutes, I think it'd be radically different.

fennecfoxy 3y ago
Yeah I have noticed that Suno's lyric generation is very canned sometimes, but also for timing - it oftens generates 3-4 (longish) lines for a verse where for the music there should be 2-3.
- gwern 3y ago
  That's the ChatGPT style. It is extremely stereotypical when it comes to writing lyrics or poetry: 4 lines, rhyming, with metronome regularity. Both Suno & Udio seem to use ChatGPT for lyrics, and it's a terrible choice, which should be ripped out in favor of Claude or anything else. (Basically, any LLM which can pass the "write a non-rhyming poem" test prompt would be a better choice.)

latexr 3y ago

> These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along. Isn’t that a consequence of the pasted text, which itself doesn’t repeat? I checked their homepage and clicked the #1 trending song. It has notation regarding the chorus and verses and the melody does repeat. https://suno.com/song/c15f0251-fbac-4a30-a3e1-002dbc78cb79/ https://suno.com/song/c15f0251-fbac-4a30-a3e1-002dbc78cb79/

twobitshifter 3y ago

This is suno, udio was just released which is even better and seems to exhibit some edginess. https://x.com/minchoi/status/1778074187778683253?s=46 https://x.com/minchoi/status/1778074187778683253?s=46 This will be used for jingles and scoring by low cost studios and marketers. Making money at music was already hard and will only get harder. But maybe this makes sense in a way, music creation just became much easier and accessible to more people. Alongside this prompt based music creation, we have AI powered autotune and voice masking, which allows even the worst singers to sing perfectly. Popular music was already being retuned during recording and this just makes it easier. In hip hop, old songs beats and verses are getting reused wholesale with little to no modification. See Jack Harlow’s First Class and Tyga’s Bops Goin Brazy. A lot of musical success is now business connections, studio promotion and timing, not being extraordinarily talented. Most rappers now don’t write lyrics down or freestyle, they record a line, pause, record another line, pause , erase the last one, rerecord, and then they’re done. This type of thing an LLM is made for. I think this means less works of art on the ‘radio’ and more garbage music forcefed by studios.

postalrat 3y ago
I tried udio a bit yesterday and found it produces clearer audio but the music it produces isn't nearly as good as suno. At least to my ear.

j-pb 3y ago

Have you tried annotating the lyrics with stuff like (hook), (chorus), e.t.c. I've used chatgpt to generate the lyrics for a random word, while giving it some artist names to draw inspiration from and suno manages to put in most of the appropriate musical characteristic of the annotated segments. Most notably (chorus) and outro (outro) in this example: https://suno.com/song/23e1d6de-569c-4c19-9551-cfda8e1bcd5a https://suno.com/song/23e1d6de-569c-4c19-9551-cfda8e1bcd5a

mjgoeke 3y ago

We're already there! Impose some structure in the textual representation of the song and it'll respect the structure musically: example - "I only ate 3 cheeseburgers" https://suno.com/song/c15f0251-fbac-4a30-a3e1-002dbc78cb79/ https://suno.com/song/c15f0251-fbac-4a30-a3e1-002dbc78cb79/ edit: yes, I agree this example amusingly reinforces the rest of what parent is saying

stusmall 3y ago
I know it isn't the point you are trying to make, but I can't think of a better way to re-enforce OP's point of "mediocrity will be even more available" than a mid-00s style, pop country song about eating hamburgers. "Toby Keith but with less to say" might be the gold standard of mediocrity.