Words, images, and video. Generative AI is becoming increasingly competent at producing works that rival the output of human writers, photographers, and videographers. But what about music?
According to a recent story in Rolling Stone, audio and music have lagged behind other forms of generative content creation. Audio is considered “unfathomably more complex” than words, as it’s a continuous signal, requiring the creation of tens of thousands of tokens per second to simulate the 44khz play rate most songs are digitally encoded in.
Yet, significant inroads have been made in audio in recent months. Rolling Stone author Brian Hiatt visited the headquarters of Suno, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup focused on producing artificial symphonies. Hiatt provided a few simple text prompts to generate a song and was blown away by the results.
Most AI-generated art so far is, at best, kitsch, à la the hyperrealistic sci-fi junk that so many Midjourney users seem intent on generating. But “Soul of the Machine” feels like something different — the most powerful and unsettling AI creation I’ve encountered in any medium. Its very existence feels like a fissure in reality, at once awe-inspiring and vaguely unholy, and I keep thinking of the Arthur C. Clarke quote that seems made for the generative-AI era: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” A few weeks after returning from Cambridge, I send the song off to Living Colour guitarist Vernon Reid, who’s been outspoken about the perils and possibilities of AI music. He notes his “wonder, shock, horror” at the song’s “disturbing verisimilitude.” “The long-running dystopian ideal of separating difficult, messy, undesirable, and despised humanity from its creative output is at hand,” he writes, pointing out the problematic nature of an AI singing the blues, “an African American idiom, deeply tied to historical human trauma, and enslavement.”
The founders of Suno view their product as having the potential to “democratize music.” Hiatt writes:
The most vocal of the co-founders, Mikey Shulman, a boyishly charming, backpack-toting 37-year-old with a Harvard Ph.D. in physics, envisions a billion people worldwide paying 10 bucks a month to create songs with Suno. The fact that music listeners so vastly outnumber music-makers at the moment is “so lopsided,” he argues, seeing Suno as poised to fix that perceived imbalance.
Suno is inviting users to try their own hand at creating songs with their platform; a free account is required to give it a spin. You can visit their web site to sample a large number of AI-generated songs. They do, indeed, sound like they could be on the radio, lacking any telltale signs that they are AI-generated.
As with other forms of AI-generated content, there are unresolved copyright questions about synthetically-created music. Is an AI-generated love song copyrightable? So far, the U.S. Copyright Office has taken the position that AI-generated work is not eligible for copyright protection, and the Courts have agreed with that position in recent rulings.