Comment by viccis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by viccis | Hacker News Reader

My honest review, as a musician who has spent many years of my life making music and both giving and receiving blunt critique:

Stunningly mediocre. Worthy of a Pitchfork 1/10. If your choice truly is between having AI make "art" that you pass off as your own vs not doing so, then please remember that, as a wise man once said, an artist understands the silence that serves as the foundation of creativity.

I can't see how "chronic health issues" make it impossible to write and sequence original music, but it does allow for the AI workflow described in the post? Modern DAWs are incredibly accessible. You don't have to put out this horrible tuneless samey music; you can just work on honing your craft.

Shortcuts are incredibly appealing because it can be so difficult and unrewarding to build up our musical skills. But then what you make is uniquely yours and reflects every minute spent on it. If you use something like Suno, the results (especially based on what I heard) are not unique to you. You could never have existed, and those musical tracks easily could have come out of the cold weights of a neural network sounding about the same.

If you could distill what you were trying to make and describe each piece, making it uniquely yours, is the fact that it went from an f(intent) -> output a reason to treat it as derivative?

I'm not claiming that Suno is there yet, but assuming that it cannot get there seems strange to me, given that the anthology of music is pretty well represented digitally.

>is the fact that it went from an f(intent) -> output a reason to treat it as derivative

Absolutely. All generative AI output is, by definition, derivative.

I've not used Suno Studio but I did put some of my own piano improv recordings into Suno and asked it to apply different styles. Fascinating results, hearing my work translated into disco, funk, acid jazz, marching brass band, film scores, 8-bit chiptunes, cor anglais solos, and more. It's given me a deeper appreciation for the broader musical landscape and has somewhat helped me out of a creative rut.

That said, I don't like the idea of generating entire songs and/or lyrics from scratch with AI. That's a step too far, as it diminishes creativity rather than supplements it. So I have mixed feelings overall about products like Suno.

The history of music, and indeed art in general, is that of every new genre being panned as "fake music."

You can have your opinions, man. The rest of us will keep making and listening to awesome art.

If you are just giving a prompt to Suno, then Suno is making art, not you. The Beatles wrote She Said She Said based on the LSD influenced rambling of Peter Fonda, but no one would say Fonda made that song.

If you think the best Suno creators are "just giving a prompt", you don't know how it works. (I earnestly encourage you to try it out, it is a lot of fun).

Well said man. Not surprising to hear this take from someone whos been involved in music production for many years.

I just listened to it myself and WTF - its awful. There is a reason why quality of music has diminished sharply since the Record Labels lost control.

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