I first discovered Suno through my friends who all share a passion for electronic music. They had been experimenting with Suno AI for some time already, sharing some of the tracks they had generated. Seeing their excitement about this app sparked my curiosity and led me to exploring the tool myself.
Suno AI is a genAI music creation program where a prompt of maximum 200 characters is submitted and a song is generated based on this prompt, with an option to make the song purely instrumental. Furthermore, Custom Mode allows you to input your own lyrics, describe the style of music and set the title of the song. It is also possible to upload your own audio and make a remix of it (Suno, 2024).
Highlights
As someone who enjoys genres like drum and bass and dubstep, I was particularly excited to see what Suno could create in these styles. For drum and bass, it was quite on point for a generic dancefloor song. With more specific prompts, I was able to create some pretty good songs and I thoroughly enjoyed the process. While I cannot explore the more complex options, such as adding my own audio, since I am not involved with producing music, my friend mentioned that he often uses Suno for brainstorming and continuation of his ideas, which makes it sound as a valuable tool for those in the production scene.
One of the main highlights of this experience was definitely experimenting with creating songs in my native language, Slovak. It’s impressive that Suno can generate songs in virtually any language, although the lyrics do sound a little like Google translate back in 2014. While it was far from perfect, it was quite funny to hear the vocals trying to pronounce things in Slovak, and honestly, it did a surprisingly good job.
Limitations
One thing that really annoyed me were the lyrics. They often come across as simplistic and repetitive, lacking the complexity I’d expect from a tool that can generate entire songs. Furthermore, while it did pretty well on drum and bass, it struggles with lesser known genres, such as dubstep or tearout. In those cases, it defaulted to genres like house. At times, the AI even seemed to hallucinate, creating something completely different from what I asked for.
Overall, it was a great experience: experimenting with different prompts and seeing how they turn into actual, full songs was pretty amazing. While working with Suno, one has to keep in mind that it is an AI that is still being developed, however, it is crazy to think how much these tools have evolved in such a short period of time.
However, it also makes me slightly fearful of the future. There is a question of how tools like these are going to reshape the creative industry. Personally, I feel like if the technology becomes too advanced, it will be hard to distinguish between genuinely produced music and AI-generated songs. If anyone is able to create a hit within seconds, it might potentially undervalue the work of talented artists who actually put the effort in. On the other hand, as my friend uses it, Suno can be a fantastic tool for brainstorming and developing ideas.
How do you think this will change the way artists produce songs? Let me know in the comments below.
References
Suno Technologies. (2024). Suno AI (Version 3.5) [Software]. https://www.suno.ai
