As a music technology educator I feel that it is incumbent upon me to have a decent amount of knowledge about the current state of Music AI, as well as have at least a beginning level of expertise in the use of the technology. That being said, I’ve been waiting for an opportunity where it made pedagogical sense to get started with Music AI. I recently revised my songwriting course so that it is open to open to students who don’t read music.
For each project I give students a template in LogicPro. This template features three session player tracks (keyboard, bass, and drums). Students can then edit the tempo, the instrumentation, the chord track, as well as the details of each of the three session player tracks. This allows students to customize the template to conform to the mood of the song they wish to write.
Ultimately, students will overdub vocals of them singing their song. Since I expect that several of the students will be uncomfortable with sharing their vocal tracks with the rest of the students I wanted to give them the option of using vocal replacement technology for their final draft. Currently Suno AI is widely considered to be the best Music AI available.
Accordingly, I recorded the vocals for my first sample song project for the course, and submitted the track, including the three aforementioned session player tracks to my Suno AI account. In order to do vocal replacement and style changes in Suno, you have to have a Pro account, which is ironically their middle tier account, which is currently priced at $10 a month. If you attempt to upgrade an account from a free account, it will offer you a deal of $8 a month, but require you to pre-pay for an entire year. If you are like me, and intend on using Suno for a brief time, for instance a few months, you can select monthly, and price will rise to $10 a month, and you’ll be able to add your payment options.
Figure 1: Upgrading
Long story short, here’s my original track. I wrote the lyrics, the melody, and the chord progression. The backing track is a super basic backing track created in Logic Pro using three session player tracks (keyboards, bass, and drum machine). I recorded the vocals, and processed them using a noise gate, compression, EQ, pitch correction, vocal transformer, and reverb.
Notice that my original song is pretty odd. It uses the meters 4/4, 5/4, and 6/4. Likewise, the introduction uses an odd progression of a Csus chord followed by an F augmented chord.
I brought this track into Suno AI, and used a Pro account to use the Cover function to replace the vocals, and change the style. I used the advanced feature to have the generated versions follow the original with a 90% accuracy setting. Every time you do this it actually generates two versions. In some cases, the AI generated a version where the lyrics were moved around, so I threw those out. Thus, some of the styles represented below only have one example.
You’ll also hear that several of the styles are not accurate. That being said, what was generated is still fairly appealing (at least from a commercial perspective), and (at least as an artifact) interesting. The melody and chords for the verse and chorus also is usually very similar to the original. In most cases rhythm (meters) seems to be fairly similar in each of the version to the original. Often the generated cover does not use the odd chord progression used in the introduction of the original version, but replaces it with the verse melody and chord progression.
City Pop (version 1, version 2)
Country (version 1, version 2)
Hyperpop (version 1, version 2)