Suno AI has an “upload audio” feature, allowing users to upload up to 60 seconds of their own content to be extended by the AI. So earlier this month I had some fun feeding it 45-60 clips of my own music and having the AI write lyrics and turn the clips into choir songs. It’s interesting to hear how the AI uses the melodies, chord progressions, and orchestrations provided in its own creations. The lyrics are a bit amateurish, but serviceable; I was too lazy to write my own. I’m calling the project Hannifin x AI. Here’s the first installment, based on my classic piece “Hour by Hour”; the first 60 seconds are from the original piece, while the rest is AI-generated.
I did the same with 18 other of my pieces. Some things I noticed:
- The AI works best with simple 8-bar melodies, or 4-bar phrases. It doesn’t seem to “parse” weirder phrase structures very well.
- It’s not very good at extended the input instrumentally, in my opinion; it quickly starts to sound too repetitive. Having it produce lyrics and turning the music into a song seems to work better. (Melodic repetition seems easier to bear with alternating lyrics.)
- If you want the AI to generate the voice of a choir, feeding it music from the louder, more energetic and melodic parts of a piece seem to work better, especially if it features a prominent string section. Otherwise you’re more likely to get a soloist, and the music it generates is less likely to sound like a natural continuation of the music you provide.
- For whatever reason, some tracks just seem to work better than others; maybe it depends on how “familiar” the AI is with the melodic and harmonic patterns? For some tracks, it gave me some pleasant results right away. Other times I had to roll the dice over and over to get something acceptable.
There were some pieces I tried for which I could not get any output that I was happy with, including The King’s Assassin, The Moon Dreamed By, and On the Edge of a Dream. And there was one track, Silver Moon Waltz, for which I got a couple songs I was pleased with. Anyway, I’m done trying for now.
As for the video above, I made it with Blender 4.2, which took a little time figuring out, mostly with various tutorials on YouTube. I’m not completely satisfied with the results. What’s supposed to be “dust” looks perhaps too much like snow and moves a bit too fast, and the text looks a bit weird. Turns out trying to create a sort of “drop shadow” effect on text in Blender is pretty much impossible; I had to sort of fake it with compositing cheats, and I’m not sure I did the best job. (I could’ve just put the text on the background picture and used an image editor to create the drop shadow, but I wanted the animated frequency bars to have it too.) Also, the text might be a bit too bright, but I blame that on the VR display I get with Immersed in the Meta Quest 3.
I’ll upload the other 19 songs I created soon!
. Chapter I’m currently on: surfacing. That is, applying textures to surfaces and tweaking the way the renderer calculates how the light bounces off surfaces. It’s really boring… uh… I mean interesting stuff.