Between 2002 and 2005, I ran a music website where visitors could submit song titles that I would write and record a silly song around. In the liner notes for my first CD release in 2003, I wrote about a day when computers would potentially put me out of business, churning out music automatically at a pace I could not match. While I don't actively post music on that site anymore, that day is almost here.
On Wednesday, a group of ex-DeepMind employees launched Udio, a new AI music-synthesis service that can create novel high-fidelity musical audio from written prompts, including user-provided lyrics. It's similar to Suno, which we covered on Monday. With some key human input, Udio can create facsimiles of human-produced music in genres like country, barbershop quartet, German pop, classical, hard rock, hip hop, show tunes, and more. It's currently free to use during a beta period.
Udio is also freaking out some musicians on Reddit. As we mentioned in our Suno piece, Udio is exactly the kind of AI-powered music-generation service that over 200 musical artists were afraid of when they signed an open protest letter last week.
But as impressive as the Udio songs first seem from a technical AI-generation standpoint (not necessarily judging by musical merit), its generation capability isn't perfect. We experimented with its creation tool, and the results felt less impressive than those created by Suno. The high-quality musical samples showcased on Udio's site likely resulted from a lot of creative human input (such as human-written lyrics) and cherry-picking the best compositional parts of songs out of many generations. In fact, Udio lays out a five-step workflow to build a 1.5-minute-long song in an FAQ.
For example, we created an Ars Technica "Moonshark" song on Udio using the same prompt as one we used previously with Suno. In its raw form, the results sound half-baked and almost nightmarish (here is the Suno version for comparison). It's also a lot shorter by default at 32 seconds compared to Suno's 1-minute and 32-second output. But Udio allows songs to be extended, or you can try generating a poor result again with different prompts for different results.
This obviously doesn't apply to some genres, especially ones that adhere to a DIY ethic, but certainly the great majority of the music put out today has been scrubbed as much as possible of any human element.
That said, the song made by Ars isn't something I've heard before I think. I've heard something that has both rhythm and lack of rhythm simultaneously, but never done so perfectly. Perhaps it's a new artform only easily possible with AI, similar to QR code art.
You ran Request-A-Song??! Holy crap, I have your first CD signed by you and your brother! I've kept it in my safe all these years in case it someday becomes a collector's item. 😁😁