Suno

Illbient Afrikaner folk? Surf slushwave? Dakar future bass? Suno V4’s Explore page presents a bewildering array of musical styles, including thousands of hitherto unexplored mongrel possibilities.

Whether this endless procession of largely unimaginable mashup genres sparks your imagination probably depends on your appetite for musical adventure. Personally, I find myself impatiently curious to find out what on earth hypnagogic pacific reggae sounds like. But I’ll concede that I may be in the minority.

Perhaps inevitably, the music Suno generates using its wildly eclectic categorising is far less adventurous and genre-bending than its curiosity tickling tags promise. In most cases what emerges is stylistically derivative and entirely lacking in surprises. Melodies are formulaic and the production is uniformly flat and synthetic.

All of which should come as no surprise really – an AI music generator was never going to be the best place to seek out quirk and originality. Don’t imagine that Suno’s avant-garde jazz tag is going to usher Ornette Coleman-style freak outs from the digital ether. You’re more likely to get an oddly mannered approximation of jazz -inflected piano overlayed with a saccharine vocal that sounds like it was delivered by a mannequin on Xanax.

That Suno invariably dishes up a digitally neutered version of whatever musical style takes your fancy is entirely reasonable. It’s clear from the off that Suno aims to deliver a disposable, largely disengaged version of musical production. It simply isn’t designed to offer a deep, creatively fulfilling user experience to anyone who’s interested in the nitty gritty of the creative process. Instead, it invites you to input a fun prompt and swiftly pumps out a routinely acceptable ditty.  It makes sense that Suno V4 is being targeted at smartphone users.

If you’re content with that, Suno’s offering is actually pretty miraculous. The Suno proposition has always prioritised immediacy and there’s no doubt that it delivers on that front. Dash off a quick sentence describing whatever subject and style comes to mind and hey presto!

Let’s say you’re a bit peckish – perhaps you skipped breakfast – and find yourself typing in something like ‘An impassioned yacht rock ballad about the joy of salmon and cream cheese bagels’…Well, you might just get a sleek 80s confection, complete with impeccably smooth mid-morning TV sax and a Hall & Oats-ish vocal delivering an extremely funny chorus like “Spread it thick, make it right, Every bite pure delight, Bagel bliss sails away, Morning sun starts the day”.

It may not feel creatively fulfilling to generate music from text prompts – a practise that largely removes craft and agency from music creation – but it’s a lot of fun. I can also see that it has the potential to provide a cheap solution if you need a music for a project and don’t have the resources to commission a musician.