For today's #ThreeTuneTuesday I would like to try something completely different. Instead of presenting three examples of a particular song, a band, or even a musical genre, I wanted to share with you my results of the first few days of playing around with a music generating AI, namely Suno. I got my first inspiration for this by 
Image generated by PerChance.
Very Straight-Forward Interaction
Working Suno could not be any simpler: All you need to do is describe the kind of music you want, and the AI is going to come up with something. The tool-tip even lets you know that it won't recognize artists or song titles, but instead identify "genres and vibes". So I went ahead and started throwing random descriptions, such as melodic punk, nursery rhyme, hardcore, fast, kids, children, surfer, skater. - You may think it's weird to include children and nursery rhyme with punk and stuff, but I think they fit perfectly together. Suno seems to agree, as it came up with a track I consider totally relatable in this sense, and may even deserve to be called a stereotypical skater-punk tune. Click on the image to open the song.
Image generated by PerChance.
Going Crazy with Genres
Okay, so it was not too hard to come up with a catchy punk tune, that kinda sounds like most songs of this genre. What else can Suno do? Some bluegrass maybe? Or some cathedral style goth? An epic sounding DIY country song? Or perhaps an old reggae tune?
And how about some harder to define styles? For example something along the lines of doo-wop? This time it was not that easy, and I had to run several attempts before my prompt got a fairly acceptable result.
For such a typical 1950's fantasy I decided to add a domestic theme, generating lyrics having to do with household chores. It all fit perfectly well! The only thing I was not too happy with were the male vocals. By re-mixing the song I managed to get a female voice, but that also changed the musical style a bit. Still, I think for our purpose it is an okay result. To hear it just click on the following image.
Image generated by Leonardo.
Cultural Diversity: Suno Speaks Foreign!
Next I started experimenting with music of various other cultural styles, just to see how much I could push the AI's boundaries. I was amazed at how well it got to capture Mexican ranchera style, and also my attempt at dancing rhythms had an acceptable result. It was just the English lyrics that I found completely out of place! In fact, the automatically generated lyrics are cringe anyway, no matter the language. But I realized, if you give the prompt in Spanish, the result will be also in that language. So I started over to create a new hit for dancing salsa, and I think it turned out all right. You can listen to it by clicking the pic below.
Image generated by Leonardo.
Final Impression of AI Music
No danger to human musicians - so far. Granted, I have only been using this app for a few days, and just the free version too, limiting my musical generation to five prompts a day. Still, I can kinda see where the program's intelligence ends. Just like how I was unable to create a decent skateboarding pic, in many cases the AI doesn't seem to know what I am talking about. The Balkan or Hungarian folk music it came up with was so horrible, it made me laugh. On the other hand, the Irish music it created was fairly okay. I was actually grateful that the cringeworthy lyrics about leprechauns didn't make it into the final version. In fact, as long as the lyrics remain somewhat unrecognizable, the music itself tends to be fairly okay, such as in my attempt of a Pirate-Metal song.
All in all, I think AI has some amazing capabilities, however, I don't see it taking over the entire music industry. Though I'm sure it can be helpful for human musicians to get inspiration and come up with great ideas of their own. And that, I believe, is the whole point of AI in the first place, as I described in this post.
If you would like to see my other posts having to do with music, take a look at my Monday Music series. - They are all about real-life human musicians.