AI Music Is Going To Change Everything. So I Made a 'Spectator' Album with It.
Spoiler alert: it's pretty great
“For the unfamiliar, Suno works like other chatbots. It’s a simple text box, where you write an idea for the kind of song you’d like to hear, and in thirty seconds or so, it will produce a completed song for you, lyrics, vocals, instrumental and all. This can be an upbeat kids song about child labor, an opera about banning journalism schools, a “rebellious” reggae track on black tar heroin or any other song you can imagine. Though there may be some odd robotic quirks or strange lyrics, the end result is extremely convincing.
Unless told otherwise, you would think most of the songs on my Spectator album were performed by real musicians. To be fair, most weren’t the first version from my prompts, and required tweaking — with genre or with lyrics — but they’re still astonishing, and the fail rate was very low.”
Out now in The Spectator: my new piece on Suno, the rise and implications of AI music, and my own Spectator AI album. Read the article here, and listen to the album now on Soundcloud.