Experiments with Music AI
People are undeniably making a lot of slop with artificial intelligence. But that doesn't mean it cannot be used to make something meaningful.
AI in art is a deeply controversial issue, and it’s understandable why. However, I’m a deep believer in the idea that it’s more about how you use the tools than the tools themselves. Though I played piano growing up, I put my musical aspirations aside to focus on software development and writing. Could I do more than simply just prompt slop? Could I make music that I felt was a genuine expression of self and addictive to hear?
Suno lets you prompt the most basic of prompts and tries to give you a full song. But they’ve long let you specify lyrics and have increasingly professional tools that let you regenerate and reorganize the stems of songs. There is more skill to be had than basic prompts, and they proved surprisingly fun to tinker with once I got started. Though not as smooth to use as a native DAW like Garage Band or Audition, it certainly allowed me to try to go from “good enough” to a full realization of my vision. This, combined with writing and revising lyrics continually myself, made it feel more like a collaboration with an AI rather than just a music vending machine.
This resulted in me creating a virtual emo punk band dubbed, “Posies and Peptides.” Though my music tastes are eclectic, the AI certainly does better with more popular genres, and there’s something punk about going against the current and using these tools — fuck your rules! I wrangled it into helping me include a lot of mathy, skittering guitars, like those common in Midwest emo, which gave it a flair I loved, even if the vocals are more accessible and mainstream. However, I’m also a bit of a Paramore girlie, so hey, I admittedly love that too.
Much is said about how taste will become more important in the age of AI, but at least a moderate level of perfectionism seems important too. The people who will go the farthest with it will be the ones who have the curiosity and the determination to continue to tweak and experiment rather than use AI as an excuse to totally mentally check out and stop once you have anything that’s barely passable.
My goal at this point is to put together an entire LP of 10ish songs. I have enough concepts and have a polished final product for five songs:
Food on Retatrutide - anthem for food revulsion while taking GLP-1s
Meet Me in San Junipero - hoping to meet up with a former love in San Junipero after death
Bae over Bay - a tribute to Max & Chloe of Life is Strange
gm gm i hate it here - about the dark side of crypto/web3 culture
I’m Parasocial with My Own Reflection - falling in love with yourself finally after all the years thanks to biohacking and working out
All of them are available to listen to now for free on the newly created Posies & Peptides YouTube channel, and I’m considering uploading them to Spotify and Apple Music soon too — more for convenience of listenability, I do not expect this project to make money. I’ve gotten a few people hooked on the band already, and I know I want to easily listen to them while lifting weights.
Is this band “real”? No. But it is born authentically out of the things in my heart. I’m under no delusion it too the same level of skill as playing all the instruments and mixing songs from scratch. But they capture something significant about who I am, and I love the songs for that, and I know at least a small handful of people who have had them resonate in similar ways. And that at least means something.