Music by the Minute

Decent-quality music, generated by AI

Suno.ai does an impressive job generating music, but the text it generates varies in quality; I guess it’s using one of the cheaper tiers from OpenAI. To get decent quality lyrics, it’s better to use one of the premium LLM services, either Google’s Gemini Advanced, Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus, or Open AI’s GPT-4. It helps to give very detailed prompts so that the songs can really say something more distinctive and in line with what you have in mind. Suno.ai limits the amount of text that can be entered and limits the output to two minutes, so I sometimes needed to cut down the songs to fit.

It will be interesting to see how much this catches on. I think people will be able to generate custom songs in all sorts of situations that wouldn’t have been practical before, just like they’ve been able to generate images. And companies on smaller budgets will be able to use it to generate songs for marketing and other purposes.

Here are some songs I generated:

• The Virtues of Rationality - inspired by Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Twelve Virtues of Rationality

  • Let curiosity burn in your heart (Burn, burn)

    Seek knowledge, let ignorance depart (Depart, depart)

• The Looker - About the nature of the self, according to the meditators

  • Yo, listen up, I got a story to tell

    About the illusion that we call the self

• The world is in me - a related song that references the meditative idea that the world is within the person

  • I step outside, take a deep breath in

    Feel the sun upon my skin

• Machine learning - the text for this could be improved a bit. Pretty soon I bet people will be using AI-generated songs to help them remember material for tests.

  • Scrolling through my feed, another cat video so cute

    But how'd it know just what to show, this algorithm's a hoot?

• Schools - speaking of tests, a song about school

  • In these halls of conformity, they try to shape our minds

    Lumping us together, leaving individuality behind

• Efficiency Man - he focused on efficiency, but realized he had to balance that

  • Efficiency Man, he's here to save the day

    Cutting through the waste, showing us the way

• Meaning of life - some of the wording could be improved, but this song overall sounds like a regular song that someone would listen to

  • This puzzle called life, a riddle to unbind

    Searching for the 'why' deep within our mind

• Ideologue - a slow-placed song about someone who left the fortress of his ideology. Suno also allows “continuing” from a song and can then generate another minute, so there’s also part 2.

  • He built his walls both tall and wide,

    A fortress for his truth to hide.