kelseyfrog
zvitiate
Yup. My favorite genre by FAR is baroque. High quality recordings are not as wide as you’d expect, and no one’s really pumping out new baroque. V4.5 is noticeably better, even if the model shows the real “plagiaristic” aspect.
Still, I’m excited about the product. The composer could probably use some chain of thought if it doesn’t already, and plan larger sequences and how they relate to each other. Suno is also probably the most ripe for a functional neurosymbolic model. CPE wrote an algorithm on counterpoint hundreds of years ago!
https://www.reddit.com/r/classicalmusic/comments/4qul1b/crea... (Note the original site has been taken over, but you can access the original via way back. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a save where the generation demo works…but I swear it did! I used it at the time!)
vunderba
I've mentioned it before on HN, but Sid Meier worked on an application called (appropriately enough) CPU Bach for the 3DO that would algorithmically generate endless contrapuntal music all the way back in 1994.
zvitiate
Ohhh this looks very cool. Thank you for sharing! Will dive into this over the weekend.
fennecbutt
Yup, give us a tool and we'll use it. I've mostly used it for meme songs.
But I really think they've made a mistake with direction, realistically it should've been trained on tracker files, and build somgs via the method (but generate the vocals,individual instrument sounds for midi, obvs).
I think the quality would be higher since the track can be "rendered" out essentially, but also only then would it be a useful tool for actual musicians, to be able to get a skeleton file (mod, etc) for a song built up that they can then tweak and add a human touch to.
corlinp
I used Suno to generate rap versions of Feynman's first lecture. It turned out really well!
https://suno.com/playlist/d2886382-bcb9-4d6d-8d7a-78625adcbe...
kermatt
This is a brilliant idea. It been a very long time since I wanted to listen to a lecture.
yuuu
> we will see something similar to what is shown in Fig. 1–1
hndamien
This is a Suno generated Alan Watts inspired meditation. Absolutely agree!
https://music.apple.com/au/album/breath-of-the-cosmos/175227...
https://open.spotify.com/track/0mJoJ0XiQZ8HglUdhWhg2F?si=tID...
linotype
Would you mind making these available to others?
kelseyfrog
Sure! I "re-mastered" my mini-album with v4.5 since that's more in the spirit of the discussion.
https://suno.com/playlist/e6c3f3d1-a746-4106-bea1-e36073d227...
Side note: It feels a little vulnerable to be sharing these. They genuinely helped me through difficult times and I wasn't really expecting anyone else to ever listen to them.
k1musab1
Thank you for sharing these, I will try listening on my drive to work.
oidar
That's incredibly generous of you. Thanks for sharing.
currydove
These are beautiful. Thank you so much
spaceman_2020
AI has killed my desire to write and make music. It all feels so pointless
I increasingly feel like withdrawing from the internet as well. Half of the users are bots anyway
arnaudsm
The biggest impact Generative Music had on my life was for wedding skits. Families that wanted a funny song about the bride filled with anecdotes didn't need talent anymore.
The first time I heard it, it was incredible. The 2nd wedding that did it, it started to feel boring. The 3rd time, everyone hated it.
Similar to image-generation, we're getting tired really fast of cookie-cutter art. I don't know how to feel about it.
ignu
AI art is like dreams. I'm amused by my own but never want to hear about anyone else's.
jstummbillig
AI art is like a photoshop drawing. If it's done by someone who sucks, which are most users if the tool is accessible enough, you will just think "That's a bad photoshop drawing". You will recognize the standard tools, the standard brushes, bad masking – all the stuff that is easy to do and that everyone will do.
That's not a tool issue. It just means that working on a raised floor is not the same a being able to reach a higher ceiling.
BeFlatXIII
Honestly, this is the kind of anti-AI argument that makes me care. It also acknowledges just why those of us who like it are so passionate.
hndamien
Your real poetry on the other hand, pretty good!
echelon
> AI art is like dreams. I'm amused by my own but never want to hear about anyone else's.
I don't know. Scrolling the Sora image generations feed is pretty fun.
It's got trendy memes, lots of mashups, and cool art. They've also managed to capture social media outrage bait on the platform: conservatives vs. liberals, Christians vs. atheists, and a whole other host of divisive issues that are interspersed throughout the feed. I think they have a social media play in the bag if they pursue it.
It feels like Sora could replace Instagram.
jbm
I enjoy playing with Suno as a toy to flesh out bits and pieces of creative ideas I have that I cannot complete at my current stage in life.
Weird, stupid things. Writing theme songs for TV shows that don't exist, finding ways to translate song types from culture A to culture B, BGM for a video game you want to make, a sales song for Shikoku 1889 to sell Iyo railway shares, etc...
Some of us have zero cultural influence and services like Suno mean we aren't listening to the original brainrot (popular music). Sure, you might create garbage but it's your garbage and you aren't stuck waiting for someone to throw you a bone.
I love Suno, it's a rare subscription that is fun.
gs17
I agree, you can make stupid ideas happen without having to make a huge investment in something you want to hear as a joke. There was a metal song I thought had lyrics that would also work as pop-country and I did quick cover of it on Suno to see if I was right.
I'm pretty sure that I actually could, if I really wanted to, create this cover legitimately and even put it on Spotify with royalties going to the original artists (it seems they have a blanket mechanical license for a lot of works). But it was a "gag" song that probably has a market of just me, so hiring a team of people would be a lot of time and money for 3 minutes of a giggle. I also would have to worry about things like if it's changed too much to be a cover and getting sued for putting in extra effort.
mjr00
Distribution services like Distrokid, CDBaby, Tunecore etc will handle the mechanical license for covers. As long as you don't change the lyrics or melody, a cover will remain a cover, even if you change a genre from metal to country. The "derivative work" carveout is to protect people from changing the lyrics to e.g. something offensive and the original rights holder being unable to do anything about it.
That being said, your idea isn't original; there's already a flood of automated AI-generated cover songs being pushed onto Spotify, and they + distributors are (allegedly) starting to actively combat this.
animanoir
[dead]
esafak
Feel great: humans value creativity, and novelty.
null
bongodongobob
It's probably just the lyrics, not the musical content. Popular music is mostly the same. It's clever lyrics and good meter that's more important imo. You can just dump something in from GPT or use Suno for it, but unless you spend some actual time on lyric composition, it will absolutely be campy as hell.
mjr00
Suno songs also sound really poor from a technical perspective. The high end of the frequency spectrum is always very washy, reminiscent of the days of 128kbps mp3s. It sounds ok in isolation but it's very noticeable when it's thrown into a playlist of professionally mixed/mastered music.
XenophileJKO
I'm not a pro, but this seems different on the 4.5 model. It seems much crisper.
xienze
> The high end of the frequency spectrum is always very washy, reminiscent of the days of 128kbps mp3s.
I have a feeling that’s by design. Firstly for computation purposes, secondly to avoid someone making a studio-quality deepfake song.
null
cactusplant7374
I'm sure if you lied and told everyone that you hired someone to create the tune they would like it again.
recursive
I'm not.
bobajeff
I had not known that this was AI until reading the comments here. I was really enjoying the 'anti-folk big band' station. Now I'm sure that's just a nonsense genre but that nonsense was more enjoyable than the stuff I've found on Spotify. I'm not sure what that says about me or the state of music but I did not expect it to be this capable yet.
drabbiticus
The music that Suno generates as anti-folk is pretty aesthetic, but when you read into what anti-folk is meant to be as a genre, I can't help but feel that an AI algorithm spitting out music and lyrics is pretty far from anti-commercial ethos espoused by the antifolk movement.
moralestapia
Hmm, got interested on listening to that one station due to your comment, but couldn't find it anywhere.
Recursing
You can ctrl+F and scroll until it pops up
edm anti-folk is also great: https://suno.com/song/47f0585c-ca41-4002-9d7f-fe71f85e0c62
moralestapia
Found it!
It's kind of good, yeah!
scotty79
big band alt-country
it's first in one of the rows, on the left
BeFlatXIII
What I'd love more than generated audio files are if music AIs output sheet music or a Garage Band project file containing the same song. Much more useful to use as a musical base that way.
TheAceOfHearts
One of Suno's biggest weakness is their lyrics generation, and that you can't generate lyrics without also generating a song. I think it's better to use a different LLM to generate and iterate on lyrics, which you can then pass to Suno in order to generate a final song.
If anyone here has a subscription and they can spare the tokens, I think it would be fun if someone shared a song about Hacker News.
I'm hoping that in the future tools like Suno will allow you to produce / generate songs as projects which you can tweak in greater detail; basically a way of making music by "vibe coding". With 4.0 the annotation capabilities were still a bit limited, and the singer could end up mispronouncing things without any way to fix or specify the correct pronunciation. This blog post mentions that with 4.5 they enhanced prompt interpretations, but it doesn't actually go into any technical details nor does it provide clear examples to get a real sense of the changes.
natdempk
Check out custom mode -- we've added a lyrics writing flow/editor to help create and edit lyrics, as well as Remi, a more unhinged lyrics model.
We can do better on user instruction for sure, duly noted. In my experience a lot of different stuff works (emotions, some musical direction sometimes, describing parts/layers of the track you want to exist, music-production-ish terminology, genres, stuff like intro/outro/chorus), but I think of it more as steering the space of the generated output rather than working 100% of the time. This can go in the style tags or in [brackets] in the lyrics. Definitely makes a difference in the outputs to be more descriptive with 4.5.
whoomp12342
you can do this... just toggle to "custom" mode on song generation
idoxer
Another thing I did with LLM which I found very useful, is to give the LLM an existing song lyrics and ask him to do a similar one with different subject I give him
Jordan-117
Their biggest weakness is that every voice has a persistent synthy quality, like it's a vocaloid it's being sung into one of those tinny microphone toys for kids. I find Udio has much more natural-sounding vocals.
hndamien
This song was produced a long time ago from a verbatim hacker news comment, and got released on Spotify and Apple and became a favorite at home.
Your comment inspired me to upgrade it to 4.5 because it did have that AI tinny quality. https://suno.com/s/tbZlkBL7XeLVuuN0
It sounds better but has lost some magic.
Here is the original comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39997706
In that spirit, from the same “artist” here is your comment - https://suno.com/s/AumsIqrIovVhT0c9
And
https://suno.com/s/YGlpHptX6yXJVpHq
Not sure which I like more.
tern
The fact that LLMs compute an average of human culture is more apparent in music AIs than any other medium. You cannot get these things to do anything original, same as with images, designs and creative writing—and it's not an "intelligence" problem.
I'm not sure if this is solvable, but I think it should be a bigger research topic. If anyone knows of any papers on this, I haven't found one yet (not sure what to search for).
energy123
I think the problem is the lack of a verifier to check the attempt at creativity in a tight loop. Creativity could just be randomness (off the existing average) plus selection done many times over a 30 year career.
That is, you try something new (random) and you, the human, are also the verifier to see whether that random new thing was subjectively good, and then you select based on that.
In this understanding of creativity, creating a new style is a gradual process of evolution (mutation and selection) where your own brain is a necessary part of carrying out the selection. "Did the new idea (mutation) I just tried make me feel good or not (selection)?"
That activity of you being the verifier is effortless and instant, but the AI fundamentally can't tap into the verification and so it has no ability to do the selection step after randomness, and so it is impossible for creativity to emerge no matter the architecture (unless you somehow create a proxy for a human verifier which seems insanely hard).
The only solution I can see to this is to try to simulate this process, seems possible but hard.
bongodongobob
Any musician will tell you most music isn't original. You just don't have the ear for it. You telling me Green Day's songs are all unique and original? Even jazz uses 6-2-5-1's over and over. Unless you only listen to avante garde prog rock or something, all of music is derivative. And that's ok. Every song being a unique snowflake isn't important. If you like it or it makes you feel something, that's all that matters.
tern
Green Day (was) definitely original. The level of unoriginality I'm talking about goes way beyond "pop music is the same old chords from the 50s" or "the 70s were the golden age and everything since then is derivative."
What's the basis for this? Unfortunately it's hard to describe, but I've listened to a wide variety of popular and niche genres my whole life with a specific eye toward appreciating all the different ways people appreciate music and I know when something feels new.
Even most (or all?) pop music feels new. If it wasn't, I don't think it would be popular. Sure, it's all derivative, but what makes music enjoyable is when it combines influences in a fresh way.
"French house polka" achieved by doing a statistical blend of the two genres just isn't that interesting—it misses so many ways that things are combined by artists—specific details of the texture of the sound, how it's recorded, cultural references, tons of tiny little influences from specific artists and other genres, etc.
I've tried very specific prompts in Suno and it's not even close to useful for someone who knows what they're doing. The image generators are hardly better—things overwhelmingly trend toward a fixed set of specific styles that are well-represented in the training sets.
This critique falls down in certain areas though. Using tools like Suno to come up with songwriting ideas can be fantastic—as long as you have the taste to curate the outputs and feed it into your own creative process. It's also fantastic for creating vocal samples, and I'm sure it'll crush it for functional music (advertisements, certain types of social media) in short order
XenophileJKO
If you think song and image generators can't make creative things, the problem is between the seat and keyboard. It is unfortunately that simple. 4o as an image generator can create out of distribution images because it literally works at a conceptual level.
Suno currently is limited architecturally to in distribution components, so trying to create instruments or vocal styles it never heard won't work. The parts that you can work in are a vast and rich creative space.
thuuuomas
> If you like it or it makes you feel something, that's all that matters.
You’re right!
> Even jazz uses 6-2-5-1's over and over.
You’re not even wrong! I wonder if jazz does anything else besides that?
Velorivox
All books are derivative too, the English ones use the same 26 characters over and over.
bongodongobob
You're intentionally missing the point, but ok.
__loam
I think we should stop research into automating creative labor and study something that actually benefits people.
cdrini
That is a very cool UI; super fun to just hit random and find new niche genres/styles. I'd never heard of klezmer, for example, but such a nice style! I don't know if it's the music, but it's been a while since a website has put this big a grin on my face!
I keep wanting to save some of the songs I hear. Damn, I don't think I would really be able to tell in a blind test that these were AI.
lucasoshiro
> That is a very cool UI;
I really don't like that UI. It's hard to read, and when I found something it slips. Too much form over function
> I keep wanting to save some of the songs I hear.
Just click the title of the song. If you have an account you can add to favorites, download, etc.
cdrini
Ah the title isn't visible on mobile for me!
lucasoshiro
Well, I never used Suno on mobile, perhaps it's that! Here on desktop it's ok
noumenon1111
If you like klezmer, chances are you'll like Balkan and/or Romani music too
NexRebular
They should make it easier to download the songs. There's so much music that could be used commercially instead of expensive licensing. Someone could even set up a venture to record era-appropriate AI music to a cassette or vinyl and start selling them.
Oh, the joys of infinite public domain music!
neom
It's gotten really good, I had it produce a track with double vocal harmonies as I instructed, it can also do echo and stuff now. I'm kinda annoyed that to try to remove the crispness they've just put dampening on it, it sounds... damp now... I'd take bright over damp.
nusaru
Immediately got a banger: "Dimensions of being" https://suno.com/song/dd3dbde0-4df6-4aec-a9be-bd2f64c281c8
comex
Hmm. Still has the biggest issue I’ve observed with AI songs in the past: the lyrics don’t have a consistent or pleasing rhythm. It seems like the lyrics are generated with little regard to rhythm, then the melody is generated and tries to fit the lyrics without being able to change them. The result is a song where verses constantly have too many syllables (resulting in them spilling into the next meter when adjacent verses don’t), or too few syllables (resulting in awkward rests), or syllables with the wrong stresses. Occasionally the singing tries to compensate by just skipping syllables. In the second verse, the word “whispering” is replaced by an indistinct two-syllable word that sounds like “forming”. In the chorus, the phrase “the dimensions” merges the first two syllables to sound like “the mentions”.
Someday, I’m sure, Suno will find a way to fix this issue. But today isn’t that day.
ignoramous
Got this Urdu song https://suno.com/song/4c5837c9-26ae-430e-839d-3cdf8d8cbcb0 (https://archive.vn/pLMHD) and it is hauntingly meaningless, which makes it ... unique? Lyrics doesn't seem to be Suno's strong suit (and Urdu particularly has a rich poetry tradition), but it won't remain as ridiculous for long. Exciting times!
progbits
Aren't they still in active lawsuit with Sony etc about training on music without license? Yet still releasing new products?
I guess they are hoping for the Uber outcome where they earn enough money during the illegal phase so they can pay some tiny fine and keep going.
ronsor
Illegal? If the record companies were so obviously going to win, they could've obtained a preliminary injunction to stop Suno's business. They didn't, so the service continues.
__loam
Pretty sure napster also continued to operate during ongoing legal actions but I am not a lawyer
brookst
Do most companies just stop releasing product while in legal disputes? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that.
ronsor
They don't unless a judge orders them. It would be nonsensical to do so as lawsuits typically take years.
rwmj
I hope no songwriters have listened to Sony music or they could be in trouble.
pier25
AFAIK the lawsuit is still ongoing.
Suno admitted to train their models with copyrighted music and are now defending the position that music copyrights and royalties are bad for the future of music.
randyrand
I think it's more straightforward to argue it's transformative fair use.
__loam
Transformative is one of 4 conditions that the court uses to decide if something is fair use. This question is still in active litigation in the courts.
93po
fair use requires it be non-profit which doesnt work for suno
kkoncevicius
16-bit blends (i.e. 16-bit Portuguese) do not feel like proper 16-bit sound.
Right now it probably blends the styles together, taking elements from both, but not following the required restrictions.
The real potential of tools like Suno isn’t in cranking out radio-ready hits. It’s in creating music that doesn't have commercial incentives to exist. Case in point: Functional Music.
I started using it to generate songs that reinforce emotional regulation strategies -things like grounding, breathwork, staying present. Not instructional tracks, which would be unbearable, but actual songs with lyrics that reflect actual practice and skills.
It started as a way to help me decompress after therapy. I'd listen to a mini-album I made during the drive home. Eventually, I’d catch myself recalling a lyric in stressful moments elsewhere. That was the moment things clicked. The songs weren’t just a way for me to calm down on the way home, they were teaching me real emotional skills I could use in all parts of my life. I wasn’t consciously practicing mindfulness anymore; it was showing up on its own. Since then I’ve been iterating, writing lyrics that reflect emotional-cognitive skills, generating songs with them, and listening while I'm in the car. It's honestly changed my life in a subtle but deep way.
We already have work songs, lullabies, marching music, and religious chants - all music that serves a purpose besides existing to be listened to. Music that exists to teach us ways of interacting is a largely untapped idea.
This is the kind of functional application is what generative music is perfect for. Song can be so much more than listening to terminally romantic lyricists trying to speak to the lowest common denominator. They can teach us to be better versions of ourselves.