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Claude Composer
- ramon156 8mo ago> Recently I was listening to music and doing some late night vibe coding when I had an idea. I love art and music, but unfortunately have no artistic talent whatsoever. So I wondered, maybe Claude Code does? Do I need to read further? Seriously, everyone has talent. If you're not reaady to create things, just don't do it at all. Claude will not help you here. Be prepared to spend >400 hrs on just fiddling around, and be prepared to fail a lot. There is no shortcut.
- altmanaltman 8mo agoYeah, it's just weird to expect people to find AI-generated art interesting when the person generating it has no unique take or talent. This is the worst case where there is absolutely 0 creativity in the process and the created "art" reflects that imo.
- Marha01 8mo agoI don't find it interesting in an artistic way, but I do find it very interesting from an "AI experiment" angle.
- altmanaltman 8mo agoI don't get what the "AI experiment" angle here is? The fact that AI can write python code that makes sounds? And if the end product isn't interesting or artistically worthwhile, what is the point?
- TheOtherHobbes 8mo agoWhat's the point if human-made art isn't interesting or artistically worthwhile? (Most of it isn't.) Art is on a sliding scale from "Fun study and experiment for the sake of it" to "Expresses something personal" to "Expresses something collective" to "A cultural landmark that invents a completely new expressive language, emotionally and technically." All of those options are creatively worthwhile. Or maybe none of them are. Take your pick.
- altmanaltman 8mo ago> What's the point if human-made art isn't interesting or artistically worthwhile? Because it is a human making it, expressing something is always worthwhile to the individual on a personal level. Even if its not "artisticallly worthwhile", the process is rewarding to the participant at the very least. Which is why a lot of people just find enjoyment in creating art even if its not commercially succesful. But in this case, the criteria changes for the final product (the music being produced). It is not artistically worthwhile to anyone, not even the creator. So no, a person with no talent (self claim) using an LLM to create art is much less worthwhile than a human being with no/any talent creating art on their own at all times by default.
- kevin42 8mo ago>Even if its not "artisticallly worthwhile", the process is rewarding to the participant at the very least I think that's the point though. What op did was rewarding to themselves, and I found it more enjoyable than a lot of music I've heard that was made by humans. So don't be a gatekeeper on enjoyment.
- altmanaltman 8mo agoHow am I a gatekeeper? I provided my own opinions; you are free to enjoy what you want or disagree with me. If you want to get into an objective discussion of why you find it enjoyable more than human works or what is art, we can do that but I do not like the personal slights.
- pizza 8mo agoI think you're mistaking the .wav as the final product, whereas instead it's really the .html blog post and this discussion.
- altmanaltman 8mo agoI was discussing it on the basis of music with the commentator and the actual product. Sure if you want to go all Andy Kaufman then yeah the .html and this discussion is art but I wasn't talking about it in the original context of the conversation.
- tadfisher 8mo agoAt least it wrote a song, instead of stably-diffusing static into entire tracks from its training data. I can take those uninteresting notes, plug them into a DAW and build something worthwhile. I can only do this with Suno-generated stems after much faffing about with transposing and fixing rhythms, because Suno doesn't know how to write music, it just creates waveforms. AI tools are decent at helping with code because they're editing language in a context. AI tools are terrible at helping with art because they are operating on the entirely wrong abstraction layer (in this case, waveforms) instead of the languages humans use to create art, and it's just supremely difficult to add to the context without destroying it.
- jablongo 8mo agoI have a deep background in music and I think that while the creation was super basic, the way the output was so unconstrained (written by a model fine-tuned for coding), is really interesting. Listen to that last one and tell me it couldn't belong on some tv show. I've had always issues with any ai generated music because of the constraints and the way the output is so derivative. This was different to me.
- smallerize 8mo agoI just want to know what's in there. It doesn't need to be artistic at all. They put terabytes of data into the training process and I want to know what came through.
- jshchnz 8mo agoAuthor of the article here. Appreciate your sentiment here, but my goal wasn’t trying to make a hit song or shortcut the obvious very significant time and effort that goes into creating any sort of art. It was meant as a fun experiment to try to highlight a feeling that we’re barely scratching the surface of the breadth of things that agentic coding may be able to tackle. I’ve been learning guitar and taking painting classes in my free time, but it’s not my profession nor something I was encouraged to do when I was young. Thanks for the comment, it’s helpful to see ways I can improve my writing style
- arcticfox 8mo agoI've gotta come to OPs defense here. In the age of Suno indistinguishable-from-human-quality hits, this whole endeavor was an art piece and more interesting than most human OR AI music I've heard in the past year. The medium was using the "wrong" tool for the job, which creative musicians do on a regular basis. And the output was so cool, it really felt like a relic from a different era even though it's hyper-modern.
- jablongo 8mo agoI've got to come to the OPs defense as well. This was a remarkable demonstration of Claude performing a task thats probably very out of distribution. This would not be interesting if it were a music generation model or program, it's interesting because this is not what Claude code was explicitly trained for. The fact that it generated waveforms from scratch and built up from there is really amazing. Your cynicism was applied before even reading the article.
- kranner 8mo agoHow is it out of distribution? There are plenty of Python libraries for sound and music generation; it would be surprising if they were not in the training set. There's a general pattern becoming evident of people being surprised with AI capabilities because they didn't realise (and none of us do fully) how broad the training set is, the variety of human output AI companies were able to harvest. Even if all AI does is remix and regurgitate, there's a segment of the audience that is going to find some particular output brilliantly creative and totally original.
- jablongo 8mo agoThis is still a surprising composition of low level in-distribution things then. Like I would not have expected it to generate the waveforms from scratch, and be able to piece them together so well. If it had just plugged some kind of notation into a pre-existing API in its code then I would probably agree with you.
- prodigycorp 8mo agoThis sounds like keygen midi music, which wouldn't necessarily be out of distribution.
- reassess_blind 8mo agoYes, you do need to read further. The “no artistic talent” was clearly a throwaway comment and a lighthearted excuse to play around with Claude. Not everyone wants to become a maestro.
- bgirard 8mo agoI like how the author shared the prompt + conversation transcripts. I wish OAI / Anthropic would do that when they share content demos.
- fassssst 8mo agoRelated: ChatGPT Canvas apps can send/receive MIDI in desktop Chrome. A little easter egg. You can use it to quickly whip up an app that controls GarageBand or Ableton or your op-1 or whatever. It can also just make sounds with tone.js directly.
- jonathaneunice 8mo ago_Neon Dreams_ is ELO × Daft Punk.
- msephton 8mo agoWhat are you referring to here? I thought it might be a song on the page, but no.
- jonathaneunice 8mo agoSee the embedded video Failed Vocal Attempt (Music Video). However when it is played (at 0:02 or 0:03), it shows a title card for "Neon Dreams." That's the song that seems one part ELO, one part Daft Punk.
- Marha01 8mo agoVery interesting experiment! I tried something related half a year ago (LLMs writing midi files, musical notation or guitar tabs), but directly creating audio with Python and sine waves is a pretty original approach.
- josters 8mo agoWhile the author explicitly wanted Claude to be in the creative lead here, I recently also thought about how LLMs could mirror their coding abilities in music production workflows, leaving the human as the composer and the LLM as the tool-caller. Especially with Ableton and something like ableton-mcp-extended[1] this can go quite far. After adapting it a bit to use less tokens for tool call outputs I could get decent performance on a local model to tell me what the current device settings on a given track were. Imagine this with a more powerful machine and things like "make the lead less harsh" or "make the bass bounce" set off a chain of automatically added devices with new and interesting parameter combinations to adjust to your taste. In a way this becomes a bit like the inspiration-inducing setting of listening to a song which is playing in another room with closed doors: by being muffled, certain aspects of the track get highlighted which normally wouldn’t be perceived as prominently. [1]: https://github.com/uisato/ableton-mcp-extended https://github.com/uisato/ableton-mcp-extended
- Flemlord 8mo agoI can't believe AI music hasn't hit the mainstream yet. It's the most amazing thing I've seen since my original ChatGPT 3.5 wtf experience. https://suno.com/playlist/fe6b642c-f4a8-4402-b775-806348640e8b https://suno.com/playlist/fe6b642c-f4a8-4402-b775-806348640e... This song was generated from my 2-sentence prompt about a botched trash pickup: https://suno.com/s/Bdo9jzngQ4rvQko9 https://suno.com/s/Bdo9jzngQ4rvQko9
- thousand_nights 8mo agomusic is a form of storytelling and expression of human emotions, i can't connect with some generated noise or go to its live gig
- codethief 8mo agoFrom the OP: > For complex AI generated music, tools like Suno and Udio are obviously in a different league as they're trained specifically on audio and can produce genuinely impressive results. But that's not what this experiment was about.
- kypro 8mo agoI agree. It's shockingly good. It's not just good at producing complete songs though, AI has made it trivial to take garbage and make it sound good. I largely stopped making music because imo unless you're in the top 5% of musicians AI is probably able to write better music than you. I guess it's the same with visual artists. Unless you're really, really good it's hard to understand why anyone would produce art by hand these days.
- jader201 8mo ago> I largely stopped making music because imo unless you're in the top 5% of musicians AI is probably able to write better music than you. It won't be long before this becomes: > I largely stopped making _____ because imo unless you're in the top 5% of making _____ AI is probably able to make _____ better than you. Especially where _____ is anything that can be created digitally.
- dfltr 8mo ago
- shortformblog 8mo agoCurious to see how this worked, I tried this on Deepseek using Claude Code Router, following the author’s guide, with two small changes: Make it an emo song that uses acoustic guitar (or, obviously an equivalent), and it could install one text-to-speech tool using Python. It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which cracked me up.
- r2ob 8mo agohttps://strudel.cc/ https://strudel.cc/
- dandersch 8mo agoGreat idea. After telling claude to "make a song" and pointing it to the strudel docs, it gave me this: https://strudel.cc/#Ly8gImFtYmVyIGRyaWZ0IiBAYnkgYW1wCi8vIEB2ZXJzaW9uIDEuMApzZXRjcHMoLjU1KQoKJDogbihgPAogIFswIH4gMiB%2BXSBbNCB%2BIDMgfl0gWzIgfiAwIH5dIFs0IDMgMiB%2BXQogIFswIH4gMiB%2BXSBbNCB%2BIDUgfl0gWzMgfiAyIH5dIFswIH4gfiB%2BXQo%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%2BIH5dIFt4IH4gfiB%2BXSIpLAogIHMoIn4gW3JpbToxLCBzZDoyXSIpLmdhaW4oLjgpLAogIHMoImhoKjgiKS5nYWluKHNhdy5yYW5nZSguMiwgLjcpKS5wYW4oc2luZSksCiAgcygifiB%2BIH4gb2giKS5tYXNrKCI8MCAwIDAgMT4vOCIpLmdhaW4oLjQpCikuYmFuaygiUm9sYW5kVFI4MDgiKQoucm9vbSguMykuc2hhcGUoLjIpCgokOiBuKCJ%2BIDxbfiA2XSBbNCB%2BXSBbfiAzXSBbNSB%2BXT4iKQouc2NhbGUoIkQ1Om1pbm9yOnBlbnRhdG9uaWMiKQouc291bmQoImdtX211c2ljX2JveCIpCi5yb29tKC45KS5kZWxheSgiLjU6LjE2Oi43IikKLmdhaW4ocGVybGluLnJhbmdlKC4zLCAuNikpCi5wYW4oc2luZS5zbG93KDgpKQ%3D%3D According to claude: It layers a pentatonic guitar melody with filter sweep, a saw/triangle bass, warm e-piano chords, TR-808 drums, and a sparse music box that drifts across the stereo field. I'm blown away. I do acknowledge the possiblity that it might be heavily plagiarized from an original composition in the training set - I wouldn't know.
- JamesSwift 8mo agoOh man I love this so much. The prompts made me laugh so hard. Great experiment.
- tuhgdetzhh 8mo agoWe alrrady had Cursor Composer last year, so it sounds like a step back.
- viccis 8mo ago>I love art and music, but unfortunately have no artistic talent whatsoever. Then go pay someone to teach you to play <instrument>, and you'll get a life skill that will be satisfying to watch grow, instead of whatever this soulless crap is. edit: Oh god after listening to those samples, send Claude to the same music teacher you choose...
- smuenkel 8mo agoNo, I definitely see why people hate on AI music. I appreciate that you had fun, but these songs suuuuuck. Claude is excellent at a few things, decent at quite a few more. Art and music are not one of these things. Ar they good as tools to aid in the creative process if you know how to use them and have some restraint? Oh absolutely. As replacements for actual art? Oh absolutely not. Same goes for the entire genre of tools.
- lostmsu 8mo agoI take it you did not like the pelicans either?
- jongjong 8mo agoMaking music with AI is a new hobby of mine. My journey started after my wife found a Ukulele on the side of the road near where I lived a few years ago and took it home. Then often when I had a short break, I started just tugging at strings, trying to fully internalize the sound of each note and how they relate... After a few months, I learned about Suno and I started uploading short tunes and made full songs out of them. I basically produced a couple of new songs each week and my Ukulele playing got a lot better and I can now do custom chords. I'm all self taught so I literally don't know any of the formal rules of music. I shun all the theory about chords and composition like chorus, bridge, outro... I just give the AI the full text and so long as the main tune is repeated enough times with appropriate variations, I'm fine with it. TBH, as a software engineer, I was a bit surprised at how rigid music is. Isn't it supposed to be creative? Rules stand in the way of that. I try to focus purely on what sounds good. For me, even the lyrics are just about the sound of the voice, I don't really care what they say, so long as it makes a vague general statement (with multiple interpretations) and not cheesy in any way.
- Trasmatta 8mo agoI'm not okay with AI taking the place of human creativity
- tomduncalf 8mo agoI’ll take this opportunity to plug a couple of experiments I’ve not progressed any further but thought were fun: - Using Claude as a “pair producer” in Ableton by giving it access to the Ableton remote script API so it can create patterns - this was 1 year ago so I’d be interested to see how newer models can do https://youtu.be/2WxSB75U6vg https://youtu.be/2WxSB75U6vg - A Claude Code skill which teaches it how to arrange Ableton loops into songs (by modifying the XML as there isn’t an API for this): https://youtu.be/P6Zw6f6CEbI https://youtu.be/P6Zw6f6CEbI and https://youtu.be/tVZigxFceUE https://youtu.be/tVZigxFceUE
- florilegiumson 8mo agoAs a musician, I find there are a lot of obsessions one can succumb to that can lead to mastery. There are those who are obsessed with the body and it’s perfect positioning and movement those who indulge in extensive experimentation (trying everything), those who listen to absolutely everything, those who meditatively repeat and repeat (sometimes at glacial tempi), and then there are those who collect every musical idea they can and gift listeners with only the best treasures they encounter. AI musicianship, if it is something that can be mastered, probably would rely on some combination of the above. It’s going to suck for a while, certainly, as there hasn’t been time for someone to put in their 10000 hours
- coolgoose 8mo agoI feel that people forget that even amateur (Imho) level apps like dance ejay etc exist for 20+ years. Imho electronic music creation is for a long time not a hard solution, the problem is making something to sound good :) (and good is ofc based on everyone's taste)
- brandtcormorant 8mo agoFailed Sample Attempt! It hasn't failed yet, it just hasn't found its audience. It's so good. It needs to be paired with video so its abrupt transitions are more legible. There's a whole world in there. Given some exploration and iteration Claude could do some really strange, interesting things.