Suno is a musical-generating artificial intelligence tool created by a team of musicians and AI experts based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The third version of this software, capable of composing songs based on written instructions, has been available online since March 21.
Exactly how this artificial intelligence programme works is still a mystery, but the new version of Suno enables anyone to create two-minute songs from scratch.
“Whether you’re a shower singer or a charting artist, we break barriers between you and the song you dream of making. No instrument needed, just imagination. From your mind to music,” reads the Suno website.
All you have to do is give the tool detailed instructions on the type of song you want.
You could, for example, ask Suno to generate a rock’n’roll song about the trials and tribulations of a former K-pop idol. The software then processes the request in a few seconds and creates the song you described, with varying degrees of ingenuity.
Persistent shortcomings
What sets Suno apart from other music-generating artificial intelligence tools is the quality of its productions.
They are tuneful and their lyrics rhyme. But don’t expect to find yourself with lyrics worthy of Bob Dylan, winner of the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature.
The verses and choruses of Suno-made songs are simplistic and rarely inspiring, like many songs in the charts, in fact.
Suno’s meagre musical vocabulary isn’t its only shortcoming. Indeed, the software occasionally “hallucinates,” and its musical repertoire is still rather limited.
It still finds it difficult to fulfil precise requests, even though it is familiar with most of the major musical genres and styles (pop, jazz, hip-hop, rock’n’roll, classical, etc.).
Suno’s teams declined to reveal to Rolling Stone the provenance of the musical sources on which its artificial intelligence model has been trained. But the American company denies copying the style of famous artists and creating musical “deep fakes.”
“Suno is designed for creating original music, and our models don’t recognize references to other artists …. To further protect against misuse, we have developed proprietary, inaudible watermarking technology that can detect whether a song was created using Suno,” the firm explains in a blog post.
For the moment, Suno is part of an ecosystem of generative artificial intelligence tools that can compose music.
While these computer programmes are becoming increasingly powerful, they cannot produce songs of sufficient sophistication and originality to really compete with those of flesh-and-blood artists. Nevertheless, they do help to put musical creation within everyone’s reach.