I recently found out about Suno, a new web-based AI music generating program:

https://www.suno.ai/

It's got all the caveats associated with AI:


Assuming the example songs posted on the site are representative, there are a number things that really impress me about Suno.

I'm not sure I could distinguish a song generated by Suno from a commercial song. While there are some artifacts with some of the vocals, the audio quality otherwise seems to be very good.

Suno can take user's lyrics and generate a full arrangement from it, in a wide variety of styles. Genre appropriate arrangement, catchy melodic lines, full harmonies - everything.

Chat GPT lyrics still sound like Chat GTP lyrics, though.

The singers are very good - expressive, and genre appropriate. Rap music gets a rapper; country music gets a country singer. And it supports multiple languages. Want German, French or Korean? It can do it.

Instrumental parts? It's got that as well. Just write "[instrumental]", and it'll render something appropriate.

Now, I've still got the same reservations about using AI to generate music and lyrics. And I've got to wonder where it got all the training data from. That's somebody's voice it learned, and some writer's melody that it's copying, and some instrumentalist that's been sampled. Unlike BiaB, I'm sure that none of these people have been compensated for using their recordings as source material for the songs.

So ethically and legally, I don't see how anything created by this could be protected by copyright. (The lyrics still retain copyright, but that's a different matter).

But again - except for the occasional glitches in the vocals, I'm not sure I could distinguish what Suno generates from non-AI music.

Yeah. Nice find David. I have been watching their Discord in the hope that they will publish an API so I can integrate with LyricLab. In this way an ordinary man in the street can make a once off personalised song for someone special. (Say for your wife on your wedding anniversary). I think this is the way music is going. It is becoming more and more democratised.

Good find David, I'm impressed, now if somehow we could get something like that to work within biab.

I totally agree, some of the material posted is extraordinary high quality. Boundaries have been pushed with this, for sure. Is this the tip of the iceberg?

I can only hear plastic music. Technically impressive, yes, but even a mediocre karaoke midi file from the 90s has more soul than that.

If you take the soul out of the music, there's nothing left.To me, this is just disrespectful to real music and real musicians, it's just sad.

Maybe the most skilled and creative musicians and producers in the future only will need one ”Button” in their music production software in order to catch their uniqueness, and never have to learn how to play an instrument, make a composition or how to sing etc.

I surely hope that never happens.

Many here want that to happen. Going to the circus without buying a ticket...

Yes! And they want that to happen in BiaB.

To me BIAB is a borderline between creative process and automation. And even that > (BIAB) is somewhat making me lazy But it's a great tool for sketches, prototyping YOUR ideas.
Anything beyond that is more of a craft, unless you figure out how to make it very creative. But that will require brain power beyond button clicking.

" In this way an ordinary man in the street can make a once off personalised song for someone special."
- Joanne, that is an example of "craft" in my book, similar to a sticker pamphlets sold for 2-3 year olds, which has little to do with creative music writing/process. If the goal is to have automated musical greeting card writing, go for it!

In my humble view, If you lack desire to work on any (or combination) of: harmony, melody, lyrics, performance (instrumental or vocal), rhythm, improvisation...
It has little to do with music creation.

Just asked Suno to write a song about "paddy working alone in London on building sites, feeling lonely and drinking too much" got a number of versions, fairly impressed.
Looks like the days of "press one button songwrite and record"are here and it will only get better.

My favourite is the last link, We can mourn the human creative process not involved, but I think eventually AI will be able to write and record a song, better or even equal to a real human's input.


Not saying its a good thing, just seems where we are at.


https://soundcloud.com/derry-shopper/shadows-of-london-1

https://soundcloud.com/derry-shopper/the-streets-i-know-1

https://soundcloud.com/derry-shopper/city-of-shadows

https://soundcloud.com/derry-shopper/city-streets-and-whiskey-nights

https://soundcloud.com/derry-shopper/paddys-lament

https://soundcloud.com/derry-shopper/paddys-lament-b

"but I think eventually AI will be able to write and record a song, better or even equal to a real human's input."

Sure, that's why we should not waste time and stop playing music immediately. Same goes for sports, video games, books, puzzles, drawing, painting, sculpting, writing and many many others. Because AI can/will do it better, and some might argue just live "life" better than pathetic us

"We can mourn the human creative process".
In chess, machines were able to "win" over humans with ease for decades. Yet, we still enjoy PLAYING that GAME and praise our best.

The question which should be asked talking about this: "press one button songwrite and record"
Does this process of "button pressing" makes you a creative person? If that's the goal of course....
-----
2044... Full time creative job opening. Professional button presser. Pre-requisite 4 years of college.

Agree with all those points Rusty, I couldn't help a smile when I read a review from a use on Trustpilot,
............................................................
I am absolutely dissatisfied with free plan of suno.ai . Suno ai owns all users generated output. I do not want to use it because I do not like to allow SunoAI to earn money from my creativity. I do not recommend strongly this website.,.
......................................................
He mentions creativity, what creativity!
But still AI marches on it seems, and I find it fascinating.

I believe that using people's music without compensation as training data for AI programs is unethical.

However, complaining that they have to pay for a service if they want to use it to use the output commercially is nonsense.

I've made music for 20 years. I started out making synth-pop and new wave. I have used Band-in-a-Box for ideas, but never in my final creations.

Since I discovered Suno, I've had an idea for a chord progression in a song, put that in the lyrics, and tried about 20 times to get something close to my original vision.

Then, I split the tracks into stems with Musicfy, remove the vocals, and add some elements in FL Studio. Then I kick that into the chord analyzer in BIAB, find a good backing track and solo, and kick that back out to FL Studio. Then I sing along and use my vocals as well as licensed AI vocals with Musicfy, and walla, I have a creation. It sounds nuts, but it takes about a day for an entire song.

The last song I made was a country song with a silly title: "You look pretty". I refined Suno's output with BIAB fiddles and some rhythm elements, along with my own and licensed AI vocals. I did keep some instrumental stems from Suno.

I don't know how ethical it is, but it's so mutated by the time I put it on YouTube; who knows? It's new territory.

It's new territory.

I'm going to pretend "ethical" and "legal" are the same thing, but obviously they aren't.

Is this really new territory?

Artists have forever been copying other artists, but changing enough elements so that they can't be sued.

That's what you're doing here. The main difference is that the lyrics are still held under your copyright, so other people can't just copy your song wholesale.

But... they could copy your melody, since even after your changes, you still don't have a copyright on it - even if it's a pastiche of AI melodies.

Whether someone would know that the melody was AI generated is a different matter.

AI in the creativity world is certainly full of controversy. I will say we use a licensed version of a popular AI at my work. You can feed it a pile of data and ask it to present it in any number of ways and it will almost instantly generate all the graphs, slides, summaries, video, just about anything you want. It only seems to be limited by your imagination. So it saves huge amounts of time. Of course in the near future it will take someone's place because you won't need that admin person to do that for you etc. So, more controversy. The government is behind working on regulation, so the cat is out of the proverbial bag. Tennessee just passed a law protecting musicians from AI. I have not read the text or even a summary, but it will be interesting to see how and if it works.

I sell music on Pond5 and one company, that makes AI music or working on programming it, bought a whole bunch of my (casual) music in one buy tlast year.
So I got recompensated.

@dcuny
Ready for the next step?
Try udio.com. This should soon offer stems download and is currently beta. It's stereo.

Suddenly I feel so..... what's the word?????

Useless?

Yeah, it appears to be the "next big thing" in AI music. And unlike Suno, it appears that Udio is actually licensing their material.

However, AI generated material still can't be copyrighted.

But while I find AI generated music interesting, I'm not really interested in using AI generated music because it does all the parts of the music that I consider to be what makes it my own.

Although not within Band-in-a-Box, in this video Bob Doyle Media shows how Suno can be used as a great starting point, especially when you pair it with Band-in-a-Box!


-Callie

Suno, or any other Ai, and BiaB are just tools and you can choose to use them or not.

It is easy to become fearful and irritated by new ways of doing things. I think the older we get the more change becomes uncomfortable.

There is good reason to fear some techonology, atomic weapons come to mind. AI has some issues. Can AI kill off all the humans? Perhaps. Is that a big deal or any great loss? Likely not. We are most likely much less important than we would like to believe.

We will be able to play and create music fora long time into the future. We will also find it harder to monatize and collect on those efforts as time goes by. AI will play and create music and at some point will be most likely be indistinguishable from human made music.

Many of us have concerns about ethical issues but I fear we are in the minority.

Good, bad, right, wrong and ethical issues tend to disapear as distance from shore increases...lol

Riders On The Storm


Cheers

Billy