listening music
getty
AI is here, and music composition will never be the same.
Countless generations of musicians who created things manually would roll over in their graves at the idea of conjuring strings, piano, woodwinds, brass and percussion out of thin air, not to mention the human voice as a timeless vehicle of inspired sound. Music has been a human endeavor – until now.
New tools are blowing older ones out of the water. One such catalyst is called Suno – and it is, frankly, amazing.
Plug in your written lyrics. Write a quick prompt: minor or major key, rhythm, vocal techniques, and press “Create” and a fully formed song springs instantly out of the ether, with the voice of a singer who never lived. Or, don’t write your own lyrics, just tell Suno what you want the song to be about, and the lyrics will just appear, cadenced and scanned perfectly, in verse/chorus form, like the work of an impassioned genie from Tin Pan Alley.
It’s almost, some would say, too easy, but it’s inspired by a real vision of a new world that works differently than what we had in the first quarter of the twenty-first century.
I helped to put on our annual Imagination in Action conference at MIT in April. I sat down with the creator of Suno, Michael Shulman, who said he stopped coding about a year ago because of how good AI tools are now, to talk about how this project came about.
“Some of the most fun I’ve ever had was making music with my friends,” Shulman said, detailing how an early version of the app on Discord came out of his realization of how universal music is as a human language.
“Every single person in the world is creative,” he said. “Every single person finds enjoyment and fulfillment from making things, and being creative. Everybody loves music.”
Suno, he said, is about playing with music, not just playing music. He mentioned early jam sessions in a co-founder’s basement as another part of the impetus for the model that eventually got made.
“They were bad at the beginning,” he said, of Suno’s fledgling compositions. “You needed really forgiving ears to really call it music.”
But, he noted, people were willing to pay for it, and the thing took off.
Ultimately, Shulman said, most users are just regular people, although the pros are also paying attention.
“We increasingly find that huge numbers of professionals also use the product,” he said, citing buy-in from producers as well as songwriters.
I asked Shulman, in light of all of this, if people will still write their own music.
He suggested that, in the end, they will, using Suno as a tool, although in reality, it’s possible to avoid almost all of the process and let the AI do it. As a power user with enough credits, one person could generate a fully formed album every ten minutes or less.
Shulman cautioned against applying the same old analysis to a new world.
“We should not do the old thing with the new technology,” he said. “We should do something entirely new. Music is communication, it’s a language, it’s meant to be between people, not just a solo thing. There’s a reason it’s part of every religion, these things are inherent to our biology, and they should be leaned into, not shied away from.”
Explaining how people think about Suno’s product within the company, Shulman pointed out a fundamental principle of commerce, that at the top of the user pyramid is fulfillment.
“There’s not enough fulfillment in people’s lives,” he said. “There’s too much doomscrolling, there’s too much paranoia.”
Ultimately, he said, he feels like tools like Suno are an “under-rated” part of the new economy, partly because they allow people the agency to create something for themselves.
I thought that was a pretty good argument. We talked about MTV, Pandora, and what the “new radio” will look like. I mentioned visiting the orchestra pits of L.A. studios, and the venerated role that music plays there. I thought this was one of the most interesting use cases that came out of the April summit. Do you make music? Have you used this tool? What do you think? Drop me a comment, and let me know.
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