I was replying to a post that has since been deleted, but I'll leave my reply here anyway, for posterity:

> Synthesizers are regular musical instruments.

That's what people think now, yes. But I remember when the attitude was: "Synthesizers are electronic and controlled by a computer — it's not really an instrument, there's no creativity to it." . The Uk Musicians Union even discussed banning them [1] [2]

I'm not saying Suno is exactly the same. Of course history doesn't repeat itself exactly, but it does tend to rhyme.

I'd note that AI tools have this quality where they look almost usable right out of the gate, which fools people. It might resemble something, but it's not necessarily your vision. The gap between "this sounds like music" and "this is what I heard in my head" is where actual craft lives.

Still, our track record for predicting where the "real music" line falls is pretty poor. Maybe some humility is warranted.

[1] https://www.muhistory.com/contact-us/1971-1980/ "A meeting of the Central London Branch in May 1982 passed a motion for an outright ban on synthesisers" (was never official policy ... but did get voted on)

[2] https://www.musicradar.com/news/the-union-passed-a-motion-to... Terrible writeup, but lists sources at least.

I think this is not quite the right analogy. A better analogy is procedurally generated music, because that’s what model-generated music is. But just like with LLM code generation, the input to the program is natural language (or maybe multimodal image/audio/whatever), and the program is implicitly defined by learning from examples of music.

I think a lot of the issues are the same. Like you might expect the model to go off the rails if you venture away from the bulk of the training distribution. Or maybe the b most effective way to use it creatively is in some kind of interactive workflow revising specific chunks of the project instead of vibe-coding/composing from whole cloth.

At least with samples, you had to do some actually arrangement - namely placing out the samples in your DAW, make some active creative decisions, etc.

With tools like Suno, you really don't need to do anything other than just type in the your prompt, and hope for the best.

The closest analogy I can come up with, is that making music with tools like Suno is like hiring a musician / composer to make the music for you.