by David Redmond

We’ve discussed AI a lot in Tech On Tap recently. Image generation and analysis, text and document analysis, we’ve talked about all that, and more.

Now though AI is starting to enter the music space, and it’s honestly kind of wild. We set ourselves a challenge to make a basic album of music about technology and blindness, and ladies and gentlemen, we did it.

We’ve got a love song for the Alt Text princess, a gospel track about asking a smart speaker questions, and even an opera Guide Dog. You’ll get to hear all that and more in just a few minutes, but first, let’s talk about the tech we used to create it.

What is Suno?

Suno is an AI model that can create music. At the end of March, Suno version 3 was released with some major claims. The company says Suno can create radio-quality tracks up to 2 minutes in length, with an understanding of genres and the meaning of lyrics. It sounds crazy, but it’s genuinely impressive.

You can give Suno text such as “Write a love song for a girl named Ella, with lyrics focusing on her incredible smile”. You can also go way more niche and write silly sight loss songs, which is of course exactly what I did.

Suno doesn’t let you create music in the style of artists, and will outright reject prompts it feels might be referencing a specific musician. It’s very careful, so does occasionally flag false positives. An interesting example I had was when referring to Amazon’s smart speaker Alexa. Yes, Alexa is a smart speaker, but Alexa is also an American performer who won the American Song Contest with their track Wonderland in 2022. As a result of the performer Alexa, written as Alexa, Suno forced me to use the generic term smart speaker instead.

What did I learn about Suno while exploring?

Quite a lot actually. Suno is better at some genres than others. Love songs, pop songs were strong points with drum and base also doing okay if that’s your thing. Rap didn’t perform as well, but you could get better results by telling it to be hardcore for example. Irish country sounded a bit American, but you could get Irish-sounding tracks by requesting Irish rebel music. The lyrics didn’t need to be Irish rebel lyrics, but Irish rebel did give it a good idea of what I was talking about.

Voices sound similar in the same genre, so two love songs may have similar-sounding vocals, but the vocals aren’t bad at all. It sounds like there’s a lot of autotune on everything, but it’s still very impressive.

The endings of tracks can be very abrupt, especially if the software tries going beyond its 2-minute limit. You can feed lyrics to the tool yourself, but in my limited experience this did cause it to hallucinate a bit more or not include lyrics at all.

With all that said though, this technology is wildly cool to me, and it’s not always going to be obvious that music is AI-generated.

What impact will this have?

Honestly, I’ve no idea. I can’t imagine any major accessibility impacts right now, but I guess it does allow people to be more creative.

If I ever needed a silly one-off song for a podcast or something, realistically I’d just use Suno now. That does have the potential to really enhance creativity.

There’s also the fact that technically I own the rights to the music I create. If I create enough music I could use it to playlist a radio station without the need for costly music licenses.

Is Suno radio quality yet? I’d argue not yet, but it’s definitely really close. I think within the next year it’s definitely going to be possible to go very far with tracks made totally by AI. What that means for creativity is a very complicated question.

Right, enough chat, let’s listen to some music.

I’m delighted to share with you The V I Labs AI Album. I would have loved to Call it Now That’s What I call Sight Loss, but I’m not trying to get Vision Ireland sued.

The album contains six tracks, each demonstrating a different genre of music. We’ve gone with songs about sight loss and technology, as they are niche topics and really show off the tool’s songwriting abilities.

We really hope you enjoy The V I Labs AI Album. Be sure to let us know if you’d like a volume 2.

What does AI-generated music sound like?

Listen to The V I Labs AI Album

Listen to The V I Labs AI Album – Behind the AI