LAGOMORPHA

The Reputation of Electronic Music

Electronic music has always had a rather dubious reputation. Supposedly, you don’t need any real skills for it. Just click around a bit with the mouse and in the end you get a song. Anyone can do that – or so the prejudice goes. Which has never really been true.

Sure, you don’t need to hold a guitar to get guitar sounds out of a computer. Some plugin will take care of that. You can just click chords together until they sound good, and even a trained chimp could put together a basic four-on-the-floor beat. No question.

Electronic music is therefore less about traditional craftsmanship and more about ideas and creativity. In addition, the DAW, the music software, becomes the instrument that needs to be mastered. Of course, not comparable to a violin, but just as I couldn’t handle a violin, the average classical violinist would probably have trouble getting a song out of Ableton Live. And anyone who has seen what real pros can do with an Ableton Push will no longer doubt that it’s more than just a controller.

Testing Suno V5: AI That Creates Music

Why this preface? Because today I tried Suno V5. Suno is an AI that can make music. Even the very first version caused a stir, although its results were only a few seconds long and the quality of the songs sometimes sounded as if the trained chimp hadn’t only put together the beats. But AI keeps evolving, as we all know.

So I decided to give version 5 another chance and uploaded a loop I’m currently working on. Sixteen seconds long, still in a very early stage of development. But it has a melody, the lead sound is modeled after a Juno – I think it’s quite decent so far.

I gave these 16 seconds to Suno and told it to continue the track. The only prompts were “relaxed electronica” and “synthwave inspired.”

The result was shocking: a completely finished, radio-ready pop song in retro synthwave style with modern beats, stunning female vocals, a catchy vocal melody, and a hook that sticks. Length: 3 minutes and 20 seconds. As it is, the track is ready to go straight to Spotify.

What This Means for Music Producers

This leaves me with two main thoughts:

1. I could basically stop working on my version of the song, because it probably won’t get any better than what Suno delivered.
2. I experimented with another song using Suno. This one was instrumental and created entirely by the AI, just from a prompt and without any initial demo audio from me. And it was also really good.
   I had started it a while back with V3.5 and at that time there were indeed some things I would have changed manually. But with what V5 made of it, those changes are no longer necessary. This track, too, is essentially perfect.

The Future of AI in Electronic Music

So do we even still need techno/dance/house/electronic producers? Maybe for now, but let’s see in two or three years which songs in the Spotify charts are still written by humans and which by AI.

Musical or technical skills are no longer needed to produce a track like this. You don’t even need a singer anymore – at least not for the studio version. And that’s pretty frightening.

And who knows what V6, V7, or V8 will be capable of.