Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- by corysama
- With this local audio model, I can finally make proper covers in different genres and change lyrics.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46641627
by sexy_seedbox - Taste is still what separates AI output from human output regardless of whether it's music or software, IMO. Thinking in modes vs. functional harmony, how you hear a chord in context, which voicing you reach for etc. are things that can hardly be abstracted into strict music theory, let alone pattern-matched.
I imagine you can get pretty close to replicating an artist's sound if you specifically train on their output, but at that point it's the same question of whether you're satisfied with abstracting away the things that make writing music/software interesting to us (with music the answer's a lot more obvious since the point of writing music has always just been... to write music).
by mg1c - That example "Comedy" sounds like the most soulless synthetic example of "music" ever. Like the music analogue of a PR-speak article of a big corpo generated by an LLM. It's still technically impressive but it's 0/10, absolutely empty of soul.by philip-b
- All AI generated art feels somewhat masturbatory to me, but AI generated music is the most baffling of them all. It's like what if someone thought Muzak had too much soul.by slg
- I say this as someone with no skin in the game, but I don’t think it’s necessary for AI to replace human creativity in music. Instead, it can be a tool for augmentation.
There has almost always been backlash against new technologies in music. Ultimately, musicians adopted those technologies and continued producing great works.
I recently dug some 20-year-old CDs out from storage that were full of riffs and chord progressions for songs I never got around to completing. I fed them to Suno as a sort of “what might these have sounded like if I’d finished them?” experiment. I found the results quite impressive and plan to publish them some time in the near future.
None of the tracks sound like marketable products to me, and I certainly don't think AI is going to generate the next Bohemian Rhapsody -- but it definitely could be a great thing for curing writer's block.
by artmanja111 - I've been waiting for symbolic music generators for ages. This is so nice for musicians. Being able to intelligently translate parts, generate additional parts, generate sheet music from audio, generate variations on pieces, making pieces easier or harder.
So many possibilities.
by euleriancon - im a musician and i dont understand one bit what you're talking about here. can you explain more what you're seeing in this?
- The vocals in the few songs I listened to are so very clearly AI. I find Suno's much more credible in many genres.
If anyone has tried Suno's Studio 2, I would love to hear your take on it. At $24-30/month, it's approaching Ableton Live 12 Suite rent-to-own territory, without the "own" part.
by dr_kiszonka - For an informed take (from a professional musician, composer, and arranger) on where this is going for musicians and the music industry, I really recommend Adam Neely's video essay "Suno, AI Music, and the Bad Future": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8dcFhF0Dlkby dcsommer
- We are creating animated corpses out of our culture.
The point of art isn’t to generate beautiful patterns. It’s to create meaning. And you can’t have that without human care and intent.
Furthermore, that care needs to be intrinsically interwoven into the patterns that comprise the work. That’s what craft is. The mastery to generate exquisite patterns, and the care to infuse them with meaning at every level.
Without care, in a Heideggerian sense, we are left with something which tastes sweet but is completely hollow, perhaps even illusional.
by tom_vidal - Aren’t we all living with an illusion of intentionality of our actions, and the uncanniness of a machine is because it doesn’t pretend?
Meaning is listener’s own perception (author’s own intent is a suggestion at best - if I’d be paid a dollar every time I thought some artist meant something when they didn’t or meant something different, I’d sure have a good wad of cash), and when a listener learns about the purely mechanistic “authorship” they start to feel uncanny unless they find an outing in appreciating the mechanicity itself.
by drdaeman - This seems to be one of the few open-weight models that isn't just another "text to audio" generator. You can take existing sheet music, convert it to ABC notation, and then experiment with various covers.
I don't have a ton of time right now to really mess around with it, but I took 15 minutes to run it on my Mac M1 with an old melody I wrote back in high school for an RPG I was writing in VB6 (dating myself a bit here).
If anyone wants to hear what it sounds like:
by vunderba - That's actually pretty neat, compose on sheet, get multiple rendition of it being "played".by didibus
- It's really depressing that I have gotten into music composition right when this is happening.
All of these projects are basically just destroying entire fields of human creativity.
It doesn't seem so bad at first when the quality is mediocre, but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued, despite the enormous amount of knowledge, skill and effort that goes into producing one.
A composer who writes a piece of music themselves, instead of being recognised and admired basically becomes the equivalent of someone who bakes their own sourdough instead of going to the supermarket: a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement.
Graphic artists and bloggers were the first to suffer this, but it feels like it's just going to happen to basically every type of creative expression that can be represented digitally. It's just a question of how many months until that happens.
by stevage - > but as soon as they get good, then any human composition will be completely devalued
I think it will take many more years until an AI is able to compose like e.g. John Williams and play a score and sound like e.g. the London Symphony Orchestra. So there is room left for human contribution. On the other hand, the majority of humans even before AI was not able to value good vs. bad musical composition and performance, and instead satisfied with the commercial slop the market was flooded over the last thirty years. Studies of e.g. Spotify consumer behaviour demonstrated for many years before AI that more and more people consume anonymous playlists never caring who composed or played the music, just using music for its functional purpose like a commodity. It's depressing, but that's how society develops.
> a curiosity, someone who does things the hard way for their own amusement
That development already started long ago. In the eighties and nineties, music schools florished and children wanted to learn instruments and play in bands or orchestras. That completely changed over the last thirty years. Musical instruments will be a curiosity in a decade or two people are going to watch in a museum, wondering why anyone would have learned these skills in the past.
by Rochus - Much like the restaurant industry, creative industries will probably bifurcate. Cheap (AI, drivethrough, takeout) for daily and most use cases, experiential (vinyl records, concerts, upscale restaurants) for special occasions, connoisseurs.
- I'm also saddened by the impact of tech on creative industries. But art always was something you do for yourself and to share with others, for some fundamentally human experience. Could an AI pray for you or ride your bike? I don't know anyone in my personal life who wants to listen to AI music, view AI art, or read AI books. I wish art careers were easier, but I don't think a career alone is the right reason to make art.by bit-rot
- I mentioned this in another comment thread, recently, but I value art, including music, for the fact that another human being(s) created it to express something. I have zero interest in it if it's AI-generated. The thought of endless content created from the void for me to gorge on like oreos fills me with nothing but despair.by hypersoar
- Absolutely agreed. Art made by humans is interesting not just because it sounds it looks novel, but because it reveals something about the artist.by yathern
- > have zero interest in it if it's AI-generated.
Someone is using AI to make songs for ads on YouTube. Maybe it's not a new thing, but I just started seeing them recently, and they're so fucking bad. They're these dull, rambling things telling a boring story badly, with equally bland AI animations to accompany it. They just go on, and on, and on, and suck the entire time.
by mcphage - Survivorship bias. You can't tell at some point. You probably already are listening to AI songs, and looking at AI images. You can only tell what you know. Given the amount generated daily its more probable than improbable.by augment_me
- With AI it’s very easy to create generic, common Pop or any other formulaic garbage music. It might be a good thing for the music industry, most of the low effort might just vanish in the sea of AI gen. This may actially raise the bar for music in general while at the same lowering the bar to simply prompting which is just a stage that will go away.by onemoresoop
- As an aspiring musician I agree, however there are two sides of the coin here. Yes, 100% AI generated music is a no from me as well, but using AI as an assistant enables solo people like me create music that is on the level with high end productions. Just think about what entails making your average record solo - you need to do everything yourself - vocals, learn/play/record all the instruments, be proficient in DAW, mixing, mastering, all the hardware and the list goes on - any one of those points can take years if not decades for a single person to master, and you have to do it all by yourself. Which is why most people give up before they even try. This is where AI comes in - just like in coding it can do the heavy lifting for you.by neverminder
- Where is the line though?
If I write the song lyrics myself, does it become valid art then?
If I listen to it and then use that feedback to adjust the song structure, because it’s not giving me the feeling that I want to convey to others, is it art?
If I then repeat that multiple times, is it art?
What if I then record my own guitar parts or vocals, what then?
I don’t necessarily think these things can have an answer but I outright disagree that “if AI is used then the thing that’s made is categorically not art”.
by Fr0styMatt88 - I think AI will raise the bar for all kinds of artistic mediums. There’s already more music, literature, film etc than you can possibly consume - if you can easily make middling art with a prompt then it’s going to be swamped by all the other stuff, the really good, unique, fresh art will rise to the top. Perhaps they’ll use AI but it’ll still be the same amount of work put into and the quality will be better. I think nobody is going to get rich and famous from low-effort promoting.by joegibbs
- A lot of music is not art. It's a content factory that uses humans.
Content factories that use AI will hopefully force humans to up their game.
Personally I feel humans are capable of so much more than pop music has become over the last 50 to 60 years.
A lot of today's music is so overproduced and formulaic.
I would love to see an arms race between humans and AI where humans are forced to continually adapt and get better.
The only thing about AI generated music that makes me sad is, I worry musical tastes will fragment even more and none of us will recognize the music our neighbors, classmates, or colleagues are listening to because we actively tailor our music to our personal tastes.
I use Suno and I've already noticed this.
A friend sends me a song they generated and I want to tweak it a bit to my personal preference. When we all can create music to our personal taste, we lose a little bit of the joy of all listening to the same song or album release.
by ijidak