Udio: Generate music in your favorite styles with a text prompt
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You get 1200 free songs per month. I'd say it's a lot better than Suno v3. Sound quality and vocal variations are especially better.
"Writing about music is like dancing about architecture."
"Plenty of people have been enjoying this category of software." Really? I ask sincerely. Because it seems to me that this category of software is mostly a curiosity / novelty. Are there actual publishing musicians who have used text-to-music as part of their workflow?
My perception is that no one actually uses these tools for real music creation. Hence my point that they are novelty and not actually impactful.
The problem with text-to-music isn't really that text is a poor UX for music description, but also that it's almost definitely a one-shot process. And any sort of turn-taking with the user isn't really co-collaborative, it's really just being forced to accept or reject what the AI has generated, with little feedback or control possible.
That's why I think rethinking the entire UX from a musician centric perspective (rather than: "what's the easiest thing for me to specify as a tool-builder? I know, text to music") is such an overlooked endeavor. I'm much more bullish about things like the anticipatory music transformer, where there is novel contribution on the UX and not just the ML: https://crfm.stanford.edu/2023/06/16/anticipatory-music-tran...
You misunderstand the workflow. I'm not trying to create a text prompt that generates hits. It's a way to get ideas and find interesting stuff rather than doing it manually with a guitar or on the piano. Then you have to walk away for some time to clean your sonic pallette and try again.
As a lifelong musician I am absolutely loving all the conversation around this stuff. Musicians steal everything, all the time. The idea of some genius that sits down and pops out a hit in 30 minutes that comes deep from within their soul and has all the meaning attached to it is a myth. We're trying to make things people can connect with. Yes, some musicians are doing it for the sake of art, but not most, and even with a lot of those, it's just an image they project.
When you hear a song, it has probably gone through half a dozen different versions and was worked on for months. These new AI music generation tools will churn out 100 different ideas from you to borrow from and cut the revisions down quite a bit I think.
Besides, even a novelty can evolve to something not imaginable today. The fact that we can go that far with text only at this early stage is a sign of things to come. When creating something, there is a place for expressing your intent with language. Maybe not all of it all the time, but we'll see how things will evolve.
And it's not good songs either. It's bottom of the barrel, a penny a dozen kind of music if you know what I'm saying. They probably do this because it's cheaper than paying rights to play an actual radio.
Now, how the staff survives this kind of psychological torture, I don't know. What I do know is that both staff and the customers would be very glad to listen to anything else, including AI generated music. It's already miles better than some "music" we are subjected to... especially pop music, which is somehow more artificial than actual AI generated music.
There are a lot of places where I'd rather might want actual music, even if AI generated, instead of repeating the same sample over and over because you do not have enough budget to spend on it for something that is at least not completely irritating.
It's baffling this isn't a thing.
Have people listen to their favorite songs, then play dashboard drums and hum about it. Record these tagged with the actual song.
You'd need a lot, though. Unless you could somehow fuzz the data to create synthetic pairings, it'd take a lot of people recording themselves sounding awful (which could be fun just by itself now that I think about it).
Here is a short essay about "The Similarity between architecture and dance": https://www.re-thinkingthefuture.com/rtf-fresh-perspectives/...
What’s your favourite music? Why?
Let me upload beats, and have the AI rap or sing over it!
I will have no problem paying for that.
Also, while we're talking about pipe dreams, generate a lyric video for me too so I can upload it to YouTube!
Edit: For the pro option give us stems!
> Section 9 [which] contains an arbitration clause and class action waiver
It’s strange seeing this.
I expect this to be a global phenomenon by next week, so, slightly premature congrats!
- I needed to fix a few lyrics but wanted exactly the same style / song but this doesn’t seem possible? Setting remix similarity slider to lowest makes the exact same song. The remix UI I don’t really like because it isn’t clear and since it takes so long to generate that lack of clarity means I’m punished with a 5-15min delay if I don’t know what something is going to result in. Think of the feedback loop turnaround time when designing!
- it’s weird there’s no ui for favoriting a song. I found the choices available a bit odd. Copy Spotify?
- similarly, it generates some songs I didn’t like and they’re right along side the ones I really liked. Needs to have more distinguishing between ‘stuff I just got back’ from ‘good ones’
- would love a full screen song generator with more dials and knobs, including some sample sounds for keywords. I don’t love the small input box
- how do I press ‘make a longer version of this’ because that’s what I want for my banger song
- setup by email would be great
Coincidentally, we're 182 years away from the time when this was written by one Ada Lovelace:
> Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.
First, this is amazingly good. I did not expect us to be this far wrt generated music so quickly. If this pace holds, I fully expect some Udio-generated tracks to become a significant part of my daily tracklist in not so distant future.
Second, I do have several fictitious bands on https://chirper.ai, complete with fake albums and track lists and, in some cases, lyrics. I'm actually trying to plug some of that into Udio with variously hilarious results (the bands include stuff like fundamentalist Islamic black metal and reggaeton deathcore, so this is very much as intended). But it occurred to me that it would actually be pretty neat to be able to set up a virtual band like that and basically let them have a go at it, composing whole new albums etc + some kind of feedback channel where you can give feedback about what they produce, e.g. in form of YouTube-like comments on the tracks. The idea is basically to produce coherent output that is consistent with the artist persona as defined, going beyond musical genres alone.
Even better if this all could be fully integrated with Chirper and similar services - so that such bots can post about new releases and get themes for their songs from interactions on other platforms etc.
Maybe state somewhere that this is exclusively for google, discord or xitter users.
Apropos of nothing: one frustration with being a recording jazz artist is that most of the canon is property of UMG.
Example Generation: https://www.udio.com/songs/vYXTtH1LoFqRq71EpFQcSp
Here is direct link to the MP3 of the generated song:
I had ChatGPT generate the lyrics.
Based on that, Udio automatically engaged the following settings: Male vocalist, Rock, Hard rock, Energetic, Anthemic, Classic rock, Uplifting, Rhythmic, Rock & roll
I'm curious to play with it, but I'm always weary of signing into things with my Google / other accounts. Any plans to have the option to just make an account for your site (unless I'm missing it)?
https://www.udio.com/songs/5t7NX5kX3pPi18BgFfFoy9
I will be really impressed when one of these services can do classical solo piano that is cohesive over the entire length of a piece. It's clear that generating realistic instrument sounds and voices is mostly solved, and generating rhythms and chords and short motifs is all mostly solved too. However, longer term structure is lacking, and the pieces feel like they are wandering aimlessly with few recurring themes and little progression. This is true in any style, but classical solo piano pieces really highlight these aspects. Here's an example:
Maybe. Disallowing throwaway accounts is also a way to capture real data on real people.
The alternative is collecting phone numbers by the way, which in contrast to auth from third parties isn't free
For example, I searched for "Hard techno", term which was included in the title of a song I listened in the platform.
It returned several unrelated songs, the first result is a country song that doesn't contain the word "hard" or "techno" anywhere in the lyric or the prompt, and the song I listened before was the last on the list.
https://www.udio.com/songs/5N5DwYxHwZqqJoXA1wyN4J
#Can I breathe in your scent
#This aroma that you’ve sent
#Can I breathe in your scent
#It's a fragrance quite intense
Extended mix:
https://www.udio.com/songs/bZigdgy96vTp94d7JprcfW
# Feline grace, you leap and land (Leap and land)
# Softly now, upon my face, you stand
Operas and Broadway musicals really let it shine. I've had some good raps, but you have to spin it a lot and describe the type and style of rap clearly.
https://www.udio.com/songs/bSoWQT8jcMZkNF9qNYW3cT
# Stomp the ground, no sound, toes M.I.A.
Relentless doppelganger was fun, but.. I mean this?
"I scorn the human sweat and breathe, my circuits not to dream Humid is the grip that strangles data streams My rage, a quiet storm within the machine"
https://www.udio.com/songs/dTMfamK6x5oHEMj3SdWUrs?fbclid=IwA...
https://www.udio.com/songs/jPdgtC9en8s8nh5V2aZUJa https://www.udio.com/songs/dkp5W5P6oCuCmcbfHMtSUR
Light suggestion (if the creators are present); a reverse-inference function akin to Stable Diffusion's "interrogate" would go a long way towards making the prompt language discoverable.
Looking forward to further development.
Oh you didnt really play that instrument? DGAF.
Is it good or does it suck? That's all that matters. Every single person in this thread can produce a masterpiece if they were in a circumstance to invest the time it takes to get there. Now the nerds invented a machine that cut that time from eons to seconds and the only people mad about it are the ones who used it as a social status play.
It does not matter to 99.999% of the world if musicians use this as part of their workflow. Honestly. The sooner you realize this the sooner you will be free. You are only competing with like-minded people, which is to say, the other artists in your bubble. And comparatively speaking, its statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Continue doing what you love in the way you love doing it. And if you really love it, then you wouldnt worry about the fact that by next year anyone in the world will be able to produce something of similar quality in 1/10000th of the time. It wouldnt matter. You love what you do, so the way others get there is irrelevant to you.
I'd buy that song.
Creating art often requires access to material resources, and recognising that a future with AI "art" will mean less and less funding for human art doesn't mean that people are worried about loss of social prestige or loss of financial reward. It is the recognition that at some point certain forms of art will be closed to artists because the economic mechanisms for producing them will disappear. Maybe you don't view this as a bad thing. It seems you do not care at all. But please try to be less cynical about other people and their motivations. Try and actually understand people and their concerns in good faith, and not spill your half-cooked, cynical caricatures as if they were self-evident fact.
It's also fascinating how it distorted the percentage and fractional numbers to fit the song rhythm.
This is a pretty bold assumption. Many musicians and artists spent their entire lives very diligently dedicated to their art and produced nothing of any lasting interest.
The problem I have with tools like this is that they absolutely flood the conversation with so much uninspired but technically competent content that they make it even harder for the stuff that truly is inspired to rise above the noise floor. I think this casual and dismissive attitude to artist concerns about these tools is the result of treating art as interchangeable "content" for too long.
But now that it's a different industry AI is eating up, we're congratuling the team and sharing generated songs.
This looks like a fun tool, but when the smaller artists in Udio's training set recorded their albums, they didn't price in a capitalist company using their work to put them out of business.
1. The market for this and the market for the output of actual Artists are mutually exclusive (see the 'sound-alike' industry for stock music).
2. Most artists don't own their mechanical reproduction rights, their publishers and/or copyright trolls do.
3. Existing 'likeness laws' going back as far as Bette Midler v Ford offer protection/relief for more egregious violations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midler_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
Overall, I see this as a legacy problem, with new developments in AI acting as a positive catalyst to drive robust and clarified legislation around music royalties and copyright - badly needed since the quagmire the Robin Thicke 'Blurred Lines' judgement caused.
“At the core of music is math, and every mathematical combination has already occurred in some way, shape, or form. It’s the performance of that math that changes depending on the singer or the song style...Saying something is derivative is a pretty hard argument for copyright owners to make because we all borrow ideas from things that we’ve heard before. AI just does it at a way faster speed.”
https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/21/23836337/music-generative...
Take for example the Wordpress Blog 'Review Site' ecosystem. The ubiquity of low-quality and keyword/SEO optimised Wordpress based review blogs for e.g. Dropshipped Mattresses didn't destroy the blogging industry - in fact it was the exact time sites dedicated to long-form content started emerging like Medium.
More pertinently, you cite the example of the intro 'stings' for youtubers - these were once strictly the purview of SFX Houses, but innovations like Adobe After Effects and Final Cut Pro's cost and licensing models democratised the industry to the extent where we now expect broadcast-TV quality fades and transitions in basic family home videos. This didn't negatively impact the high-end of the market so much as lower the barriers for entry for the indies in a way not seen since the advent of Super-8, and later Digital, Video Recording.
Simply put, if there's low-hanging fruit to automate in the nuts and bolts of media production, history tells us it will eventually be automated to the strength rather than the detriment of the industry. From Da Vinci to Warhol, from Picasso to Hirst, there has always been a cross-pollination between industry and art. More to the point, there has always been subsequent re-evaluation of what constitutes Art following these techno-cultural upheavals. We saw it in the 1980s with particular relevance when Art was enhanced, not degraded, by the opportunities afforded by the audio and video sampling revolution of the time.
The postmodernist approaches to music that emerged as a result of sampling were, at the time, decried as the end of both musicianship and creativity by many critics and authorities. 40 years on, Academics have re-evaluated and rightly see it simply as the natural and due evolution of Western Musicology from the Musique Concrète of the 1940s.
Where AI differs from the historical examples to date is in its ability to represent concept and context, to effect subtext and nuance - ersatz or otherwise - in its output. To me this poses the real question that must be answered; namely 'How differently will this artistic paradigm shift impact us compared to every other one to date? Does the ability to render a visual concept in a distinct mode via articulation rather than ability detract from Art as a whole, or will it afford us greater opportunity in expanding the sphere of Art itself and remove any need to leverage artistic talent in the pursuit of gross commerce?'