In March 2024, a Mississippi Delta blues tune made its way onto the internet and quickly gaining widespread popularity. The raw and melancholic voice dips into soulful blue notes while a solitary acoustic guitar strums away, adding tasteful flourishes to complement the vocals. But there’s no human behind the voice, no hands on that guitar. There is, in fact, no guitar. It’s AI.
The AI blues song entitled “Soul of the Machine” even caught the attention of Rolling Stones music magazine stating that “In the space of 15 seconds, this credible, even moving, blues song was generated by the latest AI model from a start-up named Suno. All it took to summon it from the void was a simple text prompt: solo acoustic Mississippi Delta blues about a sad AI.” (Rolling Stone 17 March 2024)
Suno AI, or simply Suno, is a generative artificial intelligence music creation program designed to generate realistic songs that combine vocals and instrumentation. Suno comes with ChatGPT to generate the lyrics … or you can upload your own. A text based prompt generates two 1-minute clips to choose from and you can keep tweaking your prompt until you are satisfied with the result. Suno then lets you extend the clip by adding more sections (intro, instrumental bridge, verse 2, outro … etc) until you create the entire song.
Many music creators are excited that Suno, and other AI platforms, are lowering the barrier between getting an idea that’s in your head into its realised form. Being able to generate amazing songs in any style with full control and customisation. So what does this all mean for the future? As useful as AI can be it raises some very important philosophical questions for artists. Is art on the way out? Do artists serve a purpose anymore when AI could replace them? As youtuber Cameron of VenusTheory predicted a year ago “The unsettling and the simple fact is that the robots are coming and some musicians may be next in line to be left out in the digital dust.”
Some musicians may be next in line to be left out in the digital dust
But will songs made by AI tools make onto the radio? Certainly! – many pop songs are already made entirely on a computer. Acoustic instruments have been replaced by digital models, while the voice of the singer is massively processed … or even AI generated. One of these tools is ACE Studio – a desktop vocal synthesis software with voice models that are fully authorized for commercial use. The challenge we are facing now is that even other acoustic genres like blues, jazz, funk, folk and classical can be recreated. Let’s keep in mind that a lot of people listen to music very passively. Many people who are driving, commuting or working out in a gym just click on a playlist for the algorithm to serve them up songs they might like. So it is entirely possible we’ll have an AI take over the algorithm and generate new songs customised to our preferences. There are of course many who curate their listening experience, learn about a band’s history, listen to their albums from start to finish and memorise lyrics. Those listeners will never go away there will always be a place at the top for authentic human driven art.
The difficulty may be in verifying what’s real and one route for that is live music which people will always be drawn to. Nevertheless, the lines between human and AI creations will blur and spawn new and exciting methods of music production. By learning to adapt and coexist with this new era of technology artists can not only benefit from AI but also thrive with it as an increasingly important part of the creative process.
AI tools can be used collaboratively to quickly iterate ideas and explore new avenues of music while you’re composing alongside it. One thing that will emerge from all this is completely new forms of music and artists as well as new ways to consume and interact with music. There’s no way to predict where all this will go but once you get tools into the hands of creative people they find new amazing things to do with them. For some existing examples to draw from, Hatsune Miku is a synthetic voice created with a vocal synthesis software with a persona of a 16 year old girl with turquoise hair. She even performs concerts as a hologram and people flock to various creators that each use that same voice to create their own music with a huge fan base. The artist Grimes invites fans to make songs with an AI-generated version of her song and alongside her own album she’s going to release an album of songs other people created using her AI voice clone. Producers have been using autotune since 1997 and there will probably be a version that completely changes your voice in real time to any beautiful singing voice you want with expressive and authentic sounding timbre with all the vocal inflections.
The upside of these AI tools is that it frees up a lot of resources to enable artists to create more things. As many jobs and roles as AI is going to challenge it’s also going to free up the human resources to focus on more high level tasks rather than being stuck doing much of the grunt work that typically consumes so much time and budget. This lowering of the collective bar through technology means more people will be able to create more things which in the end is a benefit to humanity as a whole and the advancement of the meta of art. Artists have so much more in the way of skill and experience and perspective and this innate ability to iterate in the creative process that AI simply can never match. This may be the real key to understanding what you can do as an artist.
What artists lack in efficiency they more than make up for in unbelievable amounts of imagination and innovation. As any artist will admit, the real value of creating comes from the fulfillment of making something and the idea of AI taking over the grunt work through imitation may ultimately be a good thing. This gives artists so much more creative freedom to pursue the idea of fulfillment and explore new and innovative ideas instead of being stuck writing generic stock library music.
The encouraging upside here is that the best way to stand out is to be truly and absolutely unapologetically yourself. To stay true to your creative vision and not worry about fitting into the mold. If you’re going to go out and create something create something worth imitating!
The information for this article has been compiled with reference to from YouTube videos:
“How AI might make a lot of musicians irrelevant” by Venus Theory
“FREE AI Music Generator Beats Suno!? Udio Guide and Comparison” by Futurepedia
