Just last summer, said experts on the intersection of AI and music Rolling rock that it would be years before a tool appeared that could create fully-produced songs from a simple textual description, given the endless complexity of the final product. But Suno, a two-year-old startup based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has already nailed it, including vocals—and their latest model, the v3, which is available to the general public starting today, is capable of some truly impressive Results.
In Rolling rockSuno's feature, part of the latest Future of Music pack, we've included a haunting acoustic blues song called “Soul in the Machine”, created entirely by Suno, which uses ChatGPT to write lyrics, unless you submit some on your own. The song – created from the prompt “Mississippi Delta blues song about a sad AI” – went viral, with more than 36,000 plays in four days and sparked debate about cultural appropriation, Suno's training data (the exact content of which is not will reveal), the effects of technology on human artists and more.
In his new episode Rolling Stone Music now, we reveal more of the tunes we've made with Suno's v3 model, and host Brian Hiatt talks with company co-founder Mikey Shulman. Also on the podcast, we share even more from Living Color guitarist Vernon Reid, who was one of the first to hear “Soul in the Machine” when we sent it to him in advance of publication. He notes that his reactions are “a mixture of admiration, shock, horror” and adds that “the use of an African-American idiom, deeply connected to historical human trauma and enslavement, just to show how close to 'human' AI can be done is worrying”. (To listen to the entire episode, go here for your podcast provider of choice, listen Apple Podcasts the Spotifyor just press play above.)
He also says he was amazed on a technical level that it was all AI-generated — “not just the acoustic country blues guitar and the plaintive vocals of the bluesman, but also the room, the atmosphere of the simulated recording. No microphones. No board. No high-ceilinged converted little church converted into a portable recording space by a young, dedicated Alan Lomax-type character with a passion to preserve the vanished sharecropper songs for posterity. It's not inconceivable that Alan Lomax's archive (and many others besides) were raided to train Suno's AI.” (Suno declined to disclose details of its training data, though one of its principal investors, Antonio Rodriguez, told Rolling Stone that it is bracing for a potential lawsuit from labels and publishers.)
“The long-standing dystopian ideal of separating difficult, messy, unwanted and despised humanity from its creative output is at hand,” Reid continues. “The horror of what 'Soul in the Machine' foreshadows lies in the fact that what has been presented at this stage will not remain static. Its specificity and depth will advance, with terrifying speed. What is certain is this: People are driven by extraordinary circumstances to make beautiful, haunting, funny, strange, powerful, popular, cathartic, healing and dark [songs] — those who have suffered and struggle to advance their art — will have to face the wholesale automation of the much-loved art they have struggled to achieve.”
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