I've written a few blogs about AI. I chronicled my various adventures with ChatGPT and found it emotionally inadequate for fiction writing and highly suspect at non-fiction. In one test, I gave it one of my assignments from my college-level screenwriting class and the algorithm scored a B! However, I must say that the grading scale on my assigned syllabus makes it very difficult for anyone, or anything, to fail the class. Still, I found nothing human about any of the writing. None of it had any heart.
I watched a few YouTube videos about Udio, the AI music generator and decided to give it a try. I was blown away by the results, not only with the quality of the music, but the human-like choices the algorithm was making. One of my first experiments involved my song "Your First Kiss." I fed my lyrics into the program and prompted the algorithm to turn it into a rockabilly song. I loved what it did -- especially the ending. The computer singer held the final note for a very long time, then ended the song with a laugh. Although I know the computer only made that choice because it had heard an existing rockabilly singer end a song with a laugh, I felt it was a very appropriate and very human choice.
I was equally impressed by another computer choice on my hard rock song "Will You Bring Your Love Around?" that I had written decades ago with my old friend and bassist Jim Jackson. Udio now works in thirty-two second segments. If you add an introduction, it has to be thirty-two seconds long. I don't like to wait that long before hearing the singer so I often fill the introductions with count-ins or other comments. In this case, I had the singer say: "Let's turn those amps up to eleven, boys." That was an obvious Spinal Tap reference. Any hard rock fan would recognize it. Udio did too. How do I know? The algorithm had the singer laugh after making the comment. I found that to be a very human touch as well.
I don't know why Udio songs are much better than ChatGPT's writing. Perhaps it is because there are tens of thousands of words but only twelve musical notes. The choices become even more limited once you pick a key. That said, Udio used some complex chords during the songs it created for me. Others have complained that Udio doesn't make key changes. I haven't heard a key change yet in one of my songs, but I'm not bothered by that fact. I've written 80+ songs over the years and only made a key change in one of them myself.
What about heart? Well, I add the heart. I have been putting my lyrics through Udio and they provide the humanity. The algorithm isn't just placing the lyrics over the melody. It understands the meaning of the words themselves. The computer generated singers usually give them the proper emphasis and weight. It's shocking.
Here's the big question: Is Udio moral? Udio creates by recycling what it learned by listening to tens of thousands of songs. Guess what? That's how I learned to play the guitar too. I learned to play the guitar by learning songs I admired. Then I took what I learned and wrote my own songs. Consciously or unconsciously all of my songs reflect what I've learned from songwriters who came before me. That's true of all musicians. Sure, some musicians innovate and create something new, but it is always built on an existing foundation created by others. Udio is no different than the musicians who are complaining about it.
I found this kind of borrowing particularly necessary when I became the bass player in a praise and worship band. I owned a bass, but I had never really played it before. I quickly learned a lot of well-known basslines and incorporated variants of them into the songs I was playing. None of that "stealing" violated copyrights, but I knew where I got those parts....
Where Udio crosses the line is stealing voices, whether it be intentional or inadvertent. I have seen examples of famous, recognizable voices ending up in Udio creations. I can understand how the real people would object to that! I'm sure the owners will rectify that problem.
Udio was inevitable since the birth of synthesizers and drum machines. Human musicians have been becoming less and less essential to music for decades now. I've been listening to quite a few recent pop songs lately and I am convinced most of the instrumental tracks are almost entirely computer generated. To me, Udio is simply another tool for songwriters to use to realize their musical vision.
There are copyright issues regarding songs generated entirely by computers. However, the songs I am writing can be copyrighted because I, a human being, wrote the lyrics.
What a strange new world we live in!
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