Eleven Music
142 comments
·August 5, 2025tlaverdure
aatd86
Have you tried suno? How does it compare?
ilvez
Reminds those early youtube days shredding overdub videos.. These were funny, but the Yellow Bus Jam seems just hollow and wrong. Feeling there's something from Steely Dan in that song..
freetonik
Reminded me of Steely Dan as well, but somehow off.
Freedom5093
I thought it was pretty rhythmic
I would've believed he's real, just passionate about music on his big yellow bus.
electrondood
I had the same sentiment, but also recall what generated human hands looked like a year ago vs. now.
The solo was pretty funny though.
stronglikedan
Get used to it, because it's much cheaper than a musician, and to the average person "attempting to say something through their instrument" and "random number generated solo" are largely the same thing.
tlaverdure
I'm not anti-AI, but I strongly believe the human element of music can be imitated but not fully replicated. Listening back to that song I can hear the attempt to stylistically play slightly off-beat to get the feel of a band playing without a metronome. The auditory illusion is there, but it still sounds off. Playing behind the beat is a feeling; it's not a calculation.
As a drummer keeps time, the band reacts by looking at the drummer’s hands and the sway in their posture. A drummer intensifies their playing as they respond to the feeling of air being pushed from guitar cabinets. A lead guitarist looks back at their friends and smiles when they are about to play that sweet lick that the bass player likes to play along with.
These are just simple examples that make all the difference when you listen back. I also can't imagine paying hundreds of dollars to go see an AI "perform" this solo at a concert. When I listen to music, I'm remembering the moment, the feeling, what the artist was doing to create their art. So still... no thanks!
kev009
The "Don’t Let Me Go" and "Yellow Bus Jam" examples made me laugh out loud. This kind of thing would be great for a cyberpunk game that dynamically generates a reality, with (unintentional?) faux pas and jank.
If you are an artist you could always slice, embellish, or otherwise process outputs into something so I guess it's not totally silly. But I get at best real estate video vibes, or unironic early '90s clip art and Comic Sans vibes and presumably some team of expensive marketers worked hard to select these examples, which is doubly hilarious.
amradio1989
I could be wrong, but I think the use case here is mainly for non-artists in domains where the music is not particularly important.
For example, a podcaster/youtuber may want a short intro track. An entertainer or a marketer may want some generic or silly background music.
Does it have a use case for a producer/musician? Maybe. It might give them ideas for chord progressions, melodies, etc. But real music does that too, and much more effectively.
weego
It definitely has a use case for prototyping sound design, which can be either incredibly time consuming or require an awful lot of niche expensive gear. Something like playing around to get an unusual drone can take a lot of time and effort. Being able to 'describe it' and get 80%+ there is a huge win.
And if you're focused on chopping up samples and sounds on an ableton push or similar this can be a tool of endless possibilities.
bigfishrunning
Having a machine-learning algorithm crank out generic music seems like peak dystopia to me
whoamii
Wait until someone auto tunes an AI generated song.
shadowgovt
Is it more or less dystopia than an army of musicians trying to eke a living out of creating stuff like this (https://www.chosic.com/free-music/presentation/) to go behind your company's PowerPoint about how its Q3 woodchip sales didn't quite exceed expectations?
Maybe the fundamental issue is that this shouldn't compete with a human picking up a guitar and having fun with it, and the only reason it does is because we keep tying questions like "survival" to whether someone can make woodchip earnings reports less boring to read instead of trying some other way to be a community?
bigfishrunning
Why does a powerpoint about woodchip sales need music? Also, I don't see how anyone is making a living on the royalty-free music you linked, unless there's some business model I'm not understanding.
abdullahkhalids
OT: Has anyone tried the opposite - ask AI to listen to music and determine the notes or chords being played? Or watch someone playing an instrument and give a textual output of what notes/chords they are playing.
TuringNYC
I did this for my graduate capstone (https://www.deepjams.com/) We extracted chord progressions from existing music you would upload and then riffed based on those chords. there are open source libraries for this.
krat0sprakhar
I use https://moises.ai/ multiple times a week for practicing / figuring out chords being played. For the notes (say in a guitar riff), I dont know if such a thing exists
abdullahkhalids
Being able to isolate instruments, if it works well, is already a pretty big achievement.
magicmicah85
I would love this! There's a song I like by a band that broke up in 2013 and I am transcribing it by watching a live performance they did and trying my best but realizing I'm trying to take a mandolin/guitar and put it to acoustic. Even just being able to do a similar rendition would be nice by telling the AI "hey, do a twist on this and give me the chords/tabs".
sorrythanks
what's the song??
magicmicah85
It's called Ark in a Flood by Churchill. There's the studio recorded version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jhBHxWrXQT8
And then I found this live version here that I'm studying: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPQZsp59szo
thepryz
There’s a ton. Haven’t used any personally. AnthemScore, ScoreCloud, Melody Scanner are just a few I found after a quick search.
abdullahkhalids
I think these are all using old machine learning techniques and not the modern transformer based architectures that underlie LLMs. These tools won't be able to match the abilities of an expert musician replicating a song by listening to a live recording of it. Check this video channel where they ask professional drummers to replicate a song after only one listen [1].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=drummer+replica...
nemo1618
I'm very interested in this too. We're beginning to see models that can deeply understand a single image, or an audio recording of human speech, but I haven't seen any models that can deeply understand music. I would love to see an AI system that can iteratively explore musical ideas the same way Claude Code can iterate on code.
lioeters
Reminds me of an example in a similar direction, where AI was used for audio processing to filter out everything except a person's voice. If I remember right, it was able to focus on different people in a crowded room. It might have been also for music, to pick out an instrument and listen to it, filtering out the rest of the band.
ethan_smith
There are several tools that do this already - AnthemScore, Spleeter, CREPE, and even Google's AudioLM can transcribe music to MIDI with varying accuracy depending on instrument complexity and audio quality.
ElectricalTears
A while ago (maybe a year) I asked chatgpt to make a guitar tab from a song that had no available tabs and it worked surprisingly well.
stillpointlab
I really hope we move on from these boil-the-ocean models. I want something more collaborative and even iterative.
I was having a conversation with a former bandmate. He was talking about a bunch of songs he is working on. He can play guitar, a bit of bass and can sing. That leaves drums. He wants a model where he can upload a demo and it either returns a stem for a drum track or just combines his demo with some drums.
Right now these models are more like slot machines than tools. If you have the money and the time/patience, perhaps you can do something with it. But I am looking forward to when we start getting collaborative, interactive and iterative models.
nartho
Most VST drum sequencers have pretty powerful groove libraries nowadays. It's not a model or anything like that but just mix-matching and modifying the patterns some give extremely good results
krat0sprakhar
Very well said. I'm in the same boat. I'd love AI to write down a drum groove or a drum fill based on my guitar riff.
Currently, all these AI tools generate the whole song which I'm not at all interested in given songwriting is so much fun
viccis
RIP session musicians if that ever comes to pass, which is one of the main ways to make money if you are a good drummer.
pacifika
I’d recommend GarageBand for this.
stillpointlab
I haven't used the virtual drummer feature of GarageBand recently, but my experience with it was pretty disappointing. The output sounds very midi or like the most basic loops.
I believe there is massive room for improvement over what is currently available.
However, my larger point isn't "I want to do this one particular thing" and rather: I wish the music model companies would divert some attention away from "prompt a complete song in one shot" and towards "provide tools to iteratively improve songs in collaboration with a musician/producer".
amohn9
Suno can already do that
two-sandwich
If you consider that Entertainment gives the viewer what they want, and art intends to challenge, none of what's created here is "art". It doesn't push boundaries, create new genres, or satisfy an uncomfortable curiosity.
The tech here is fantastic. I love that such things are possible now and they're an exciting frontier in creation.
It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties. I'm not an artist, so I don't feel personally attacked. Much like image gen, this seems to be aimed at replacing the bare-minimum artist (visual or auditory) with a "fill in the blanks" entertainment piece.
moritzwarhier
> Entertainment gives the viewer what they want, and art intends to challenge
This is a fruitless and snobby dichotomy that was attempted so many times in human history, and it makes no sense.
There will always be art made for success and/or money, but drawing a line is futile.
Händel used to be a bit like a pop musician.
And intellectual snobbishness or noble ideas do not make art more valuable.
A kid singing Wonderwall can be art, too. As can be a depressed person recording experimental field sounds.
Feel free to call art bad, but assuming an obvious and clear separation between art and entertainment is the exact opposite of the spirit that enables people to make or appreciate art, in whatever form, culture or shape.
viccis
>Händel used to be a bit like a pop musician.
Handel was never a "bit like a pop musician." This fundamentally misunderstands how music during his time, mostly funded and enjoyed under religion and wealthy patronage contexts, was listened to. Mostly only the wealthy listened to his works, and those elite audiences were prone to viciously enforcing stylistic norms. The only real way the working class heard his works were in the occasional public concert and occasionally in church. At no point in any of these settings was there a lack of stylistic gatekeeping or snobbery.
I know this kind of nihilistic "everything is good, I guess, good doesn't even mean anything" attitude is popular in some spaces, but this lack of standards or gatekeeping in favor of a tasteless desire for increasing slop production regardless of quality is how we got poptimism and the current state of music. No longer is there any taste making, just taste production via algorithms.
Sometimes we need a bit of snobbery to separate the wheat from the chaff, and being a gatekeeping snob against AI music is what our current day and age needs more of!
Krasnol
Well, in the end, the only thing this snobbery does is that it makes you look/sound old.
Nobody cares. I've heard the same thing when electronic music came up. The old ones couldn't stop complaining about this "computer music" where nobody does real handwork anymore.
I see it as democratisation of art. Everybody can do it now and this is a good thing.
Let's face reality. There is no way back. We'll see what comes of it. I've seen fascinating videos recently on reddit. Things people came up with and would have never gotten the budget to be made. It's great.
kelseyfrog
Art is a framing device largely independent of the content. It's how we get Fountain[1], Piss Christ[2], Comedian[3], Mother![4], 4’33”[5], and Seedbed[6] to name a few among countless others. To claim that AI content is incapable of being framed as art is nonsense when we have example after example of the diversity of what art can be. Let's remember, bad art is still art.
1. Marcel Duchamp. 1917
2. Andres Serrano. 1987
3. Maurizio Cattelan. 2019
4. Darren Aronofsky. 2017
5. John Cage. 1952
6. Vito Acconci. 1972
fruitworks
If that was true, then the development of a new urinal factory would have the same impact on art as the development of a new AI art models.
The framing is dependent on the content
kelseyfrog
Framings require creators; they don't arise spontaneously. Someone could turn a urinal factory into art, but art doesn't validate itself. Belief alone in artistic essentialism doesn’t make it so.
blargey
Art is communication.
That "generic" and "indescribably lifeless" feeling you get is because the only thing communicated by a model-and-prompt generation is the model identity and the prompt.
qgin
If your art can be replaced by a model that recycles what’s already been done, maybe you were just recycling what’s already been done too.
anigbrowl
How do you expect people to get good when AI is pushing them out of the entry-level stages where they were previously able to earn a modest living while developing their craft?
> oh now they won't have to do that boring mindless stuff like playing cover versions any more
That's how most musicians make their first $, doing covers or making something generic enough to be saleable as background music
_DeadFred_
AI eats the seedcorn. Anyone that needs space to grow? Crowded out. Entry level incomes, replaced. No more entry, sorry.
For all of human civilization the future has been built on the backs of those the came before (on the backs of giants). But that climb is slowing, maybe halting. Which then compounds when the new giants that would have risen up don't. AI replaces the messy, slow process of becoming with instant regurgitation, replaces those that would have grown. The future, built on the backs of giants, stalls when those giants never get the chance to rise.
AI is entropy weaponized against every layer of future progress. But everyone is too busy salivating at potential cost savings to see it.
sekai
> and art intends to challenge, none of what's created here is "art". It doesn't push boundaries, create new genres, or satisfy an uncomfortable curiosity.
Art is, above all, subjective.
> It's very dystopian to feel that the robots are making generic human-music with indescribably lifeless properties.
Painters said the same thing about the camera. Photographers said the same thing about Photoshop.
null
fruitworks
This art is subjectively bad
ronsor
The fact that these models have so many people irritated like there's sand in their pants is enough proof that they're pushing boundaries and making some uncomfortable.
Levitz
Not every boundary is worth pushing.
I'm hoping it will eventually become better, or maybe I haven't quite seen stuff prompted properly yet, but all I've heard coming from an AI feels aggressively mediocre and average, not in a "bad" way but in the "optimizing towards being palatable to the average person" way. Like the perfect McDonalds meal that the algorithm has found out can be 30% sawdust and still feel appetizing. I don't want that boundary being pushed. I feel we will live in a worse world if we do.
recursive
Besides the point, but I think that's basically what happened to Subway.
thefaux
Yes, because the people pushing the boundaries do not understand the value of the thing they are trying to commoditize. If they did, they wouldn't be trying to commoditize it. There is a pervasive attitude among technologists that they can improve things they don't understand through technological efficiency. They are wrong in this case and getting appropriate pushback.
Personally, music is sacred for me so making money is not a part of my process. I am not worried about job loss. But I am worried about the cultural malaise that emerges from the natural passivity of industrial scale consumerism.
nonhaver
Well put and reflects my thoughts exactly. It's borderline concerning there are people who consume this type of media by choice and forethought.
paxys
Tech is tech. What you create with the tech can be art.
bix6
These feels different than experimenting with a new synth or something though. It’s just feeding a sentence to the model.
altruios
'Just' is a loaded word here.
In image gen: comfyUI gives a node-based workflow that gives a lot of room for 'creative' control, of mixing, and mathematically combining masks, filters, and prompts (and starting images / noise {at any node in that process}).
I would expect the same interface for audio to emerge for 'power users'.
kingstnap
I draw a very sharp line: curating the outputs and crafting the sentence is enough to make it art. If neither of those happen, it's just slop.
It's actually a bit like photography. A bunch of randomly taken pictures piled together is not art. It needs to be done with purpose and refinement.
Basically, in my own opinion, art ≠ a function of technical difficulty.
Art = Curation, Refinement, and Taste
CamperBob2
"It's just pushing a button on the camera."
throwawayoldie
I would like to say this categorically now: if you're using AI to generate any kind of art, go die in a fire.
ebiester
Is that LLMs? Generative AI? Anything with machine learning? Anything using a public model? Does that include something like Baby Audio TAIP? Noise removal software that uses ML?
How about Refik Anadol?
throwawayoldie
Yes.
dawnerd
It's already bad enough before this came out on the different streaming platforms. People are grifting off known musicians and labeling them as album artists to get their awful ai songs put into mixes.
throwawayoldie
This is a shitty timeline and I would like to transfer to a better one. Hey, maybe these AIs can tell me how to do that.
feoren
We imagined a utopian future where robots did our menial work so we were free to be creative. Instead we got a dystopian future where we do more and more menial work so our robots can poorly emulate creativity. It's not too late to turn it around, but that requires recognizing the humanity of 99.9% of people, and the 0.1% who own everything would rather create their own synthetic (subservient) humans than recognize the basic rights of the ones that already exist (and can make fun of them on Twitter).
krapp
They said the same thing about automation when the Industrial Revolution began a century or so ago. That the common worker would be liberated from the drudgery of labor and be free for creative and intellectual pursuits. The people who protested were ridiculed as Luddites who simply feared technology and progress.
Of course, because automation serves the interests of capital (being created by, and invested in, by the capitalist class,) the end result was just that workers worked more, and more often, and got paid less, and the capitalist class captured the extra value. The Luddites were right about everything.
I don't know why people expect the automation of intellect and creativity to be any different. Working at a keyboard instead of on a factory floor doesn't exempt you from the incentives of capitalism.
asukumar
Are you suggesting that subsistence farmers were better off than workers after the industrial revolution? I find that hard to believe.
krapp
In some ways, yes, they were.
Subsistence farmers weren't cramped in filthy disease ridden workhouses, getting paid in company scrip, getting mangled by machines or being locked into burning buildings. And subsistence farmers owned what they produced and the means by which it was produced, whereas industrial workers owned nothing but the pennies in their pocket, and likely owed more than that to the company.
It took years of often violent protest for workers to return to even the basic level of dignity and rights once afforded to craftsmen and farmers.
But then comparing farmers and workers in this context is a bit specious. It would be more fair to compare, say, textile workers before the automated loom and textile workers after. Obviously the former had it much better off, which was precisely the problem automation was intended to solve.
kingstnap
It's only from a position of extreme arrogance that you can complain that machines have not yet done enough for you.
But it's the fun thing about being humans, I suppose. Our insatiable greed means we demand endlessly more.
anigbrowl
This comment doesn't engage with the critique at all, it's just reflexive moralization.
thepryz
Maybe I’m a Luddite, but this seems like it will just lead to music becoming superficial and lacking intentionality, or dare I say it, soul.
crazydoggers
I think you just described pop music
thepryz
It’s easy and popular to hate on pop music, but even pop music has value and requires a certain skill to understand what resonates with people.
This is taking a monkeys on a typewriter approach to all music. Click a button, see what the monkeys made and then click another button to publish to Spotify while you figure out a way to either market the music or just game search and digital assistants by creating an artist with a similar or slightly misspelled name as someone popular. Rinse and repeat.
shadowgovt
The current solution for creating the kind of music this tool can back-fill is to go on a site like "Free music for presentations" and click line after line after line after line of 10-second samples hoping to find one that "vibes" with you.
If anything, this is a lateral move.
colechristensen
>music becoming superficial and lacking intentionality, or dare I say it, soul.
This phrase though could be plunked down at any point in the last hundred years and you'd find someone making it.
About autotune or electric guitars or rock or jazz or punk or disco or Philp Glass or Stravinsky... one could go on for a long time.
darth_avocado
A lot of criticism of AI in music seems to be around the lack of originality and it being generic slop. But unfortunately that’s true for pretty much the entire music industry. Handful of people write songs for all the artists, “artists” don’t create the songs as much as they perform them, most of the music isn’t created but rather sampled or is “inspired” by other music and pretty much most of the artists sound like other artists.
Yes there are smaller creators who are trying to make something net new, but unfortunately 99.9% of the small artists are also derivative and lack originality.
I see AI music as just continuation of the sad state of the industry at the moment. Hopefully it accelerates the demise of the industry as we know it and restarts the cycle of creation.
feoren
None of that is new, but there were ways for the genuinely new, inspired, and genius to actually shine through before. It was hard, but possible. Humanity is making decisions that make that even harder: AI music, Spotify's revenue model, etc. They're all to the benefit of cookie-cutter slop (AI or human-made) over creativity.
This wouldn't necessarily be a problem as long as people were still free to create on their own. But instead, everyone is forced to spend more hours in menial bullshit jobs for less and less (relative) pay just to survive. Give everyone enough resources to live at least a simple life, and both human creativity and AI creativity can blossom at the same time. But of course that means fewer yachts and hookers and drugs for the billionaires, so it is verboten.
hudo
AI is great, I can see it benefit so many industries, except music. There's something profoundly wrong with AI generated music.
neom
It's interesting to me people really hate AI gen'd music, some people I know literally won't listen to it and just like... get kinda angry I even tried to show them what I made (so I stopped showing people for now). I have a good memory for sound, but whatever neurodiversity I have makes learning instruments (and math, and written words, and and) super challenging. I loved screwing around remixing stuff in Abelton, but I've not touched it since suno. I just looked at my suno library, I've gen'd 1,100 tracks since March 18th, 2024. The levels of audiophile or...musicophile? is pretty wide, but I don't think I'm a total n00b and I think some of the stuff I've made is actually pretty good, even if I do say so myself (and I'm fine even if I just make it for myself to listen to, as that's what I always did anyway). :)
TrackerFF
I'm a musician
I haven't used the elevnlabs one, but I've checked out suno and udio, and to be honest the tech is amazing. But like with a lot of genai images, the current music models have the same smell to it.
These models can def be used to crank out commercially sounding music, but I have yet to hear any output that sounds fresh and exciting. If your goal is to create bro country, these models are a god-send.
With that said, I do believe that musicians will start to create music with these tools as aid. I've tried to use them for generating samples and ideas, and they do work well enough.
null
MarcelOlsz
>With that said, I do believe that musicians will start to create music with these tools as aid.
The more tech advances the cooler it is to bury your head in the sand. Studying by paper & candlelight has never been more of a flex.
Unless you're talking about EDM people and those adjacent. Not that they're not "real musicians" but they're much more about tech and gadgets so I can see them using it more.
TrackerFF
I'm a "real" musician, and have done session / studio work, as well as made a living by playing live music in my younger days, before getting a "real job" in tech.
While there will no doubt be many that feel they're above using tools like these, the reality is that if you want to make money out of music - you're going to make music for the masses.
And if there's one thing these models really excel at, it is to make commercial sounding music. Everything sounds nice and bland.
MarcelOlsz
Ah yeah, I don't even register the commercial world so didn't mention it as it's a given. Doing that type of work would suck so bad IMO.
anigbrowl
I'm an electronic musician and AI music is banned on my favorite forum. Someone popped up a few months back challenging everyone to listen to their AI-generated music album and ended up being flamed to a crisp - not because people didn't engage with it, but because they did and pointed out in detail what was so bad about it.
I've played guitar for 23 years, and there is something just off-putting about most of the music on that page, but particularly "Yellow Bus Jam".
The guitar solo sounds very unnatural, especially the phrasing, which is totally random. Blues musicians are actually attempting to say something through their instrument. This was just a random number generated solo played by a 6 finger three handed robot. No thanks, lol.