Should Making Music Be Hard?

New AI technology has shaken me to my core about what it means to make music.

Rolling Stone recently published an article about Suno AI, a startup that allows you to generate two-minute songs from a text prompts. This is the first piece of musical AI technology that has legitimately left me somewhere between astonished and scared. Below you can listen to “Kaleidoscope of Love”, the song I created using Suno just by entering the text “1960s style psychedelic rock about falling in love for the first time.”

Is this a good song? No. But I don’t think that matters. What matters is that it is a song. It has discernible sections and some understanding of the genre that I prompted it to create. I’ll probably talk about the legal and moral ethics of this technology in the future, but for now I want to talk about something else that popped into my mind while messing around with this technology: should music be this easy to make?

Before we dive into that topic, I want to remind you that this newsletter is available as a podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Substack. Also, if you live in the New York City-area, my friend Ken and I will be playing a short acoustic show at Pet Shop in Jersey City tonight from 8:30 to 9:00 PM. Come by if you’re free. The music will surely be performed by humans.

I’m Only Human After All

Below is a video of me playing your basic rock n’ roll beat on the drums, albeit with a few flourishes.

Please don’t criticize my drumming. You’re looking at the extent of my skills. Regardless, I want to walk you through what’s going on here because it’s somewhat interesting if you’ve never drummed before.

Though this is a rudimentary beat, it requires four limbs. My right foot is hitting the kick drum on the first and third beats. My left foot is periodically opening and closing the hi hat while my right hand hammers away eight notes on that same cymbal pair. Amid all that, my left hand is hitting the snare drum on the second and fourth beats. Compare that process to me making much the same beat on my Korg Volca Beats drum machine.

Is there a difference between these two music-making processes? Watching these videos back, the first thing that strikes me is the endlessness of the beat-making process on the drum machine. Once you have the beat set up, it will play until the batteries die. The length of time I could play the same beat on an actual drum kit would be a function of my mental and physical stamina. Furthermore, even if I played that beat correctly for 500 straight measures on the real drum kit, there would be no assurance that I would do so the 501st time. Short of a malfunction, the drum machine will never have that issue.

After observing the eternity of the drum machine, the second thing that would jump out at me would be that creating this rhythm on the drum machine looks much easier than doing it on the drum set. And this would be true to some degree. Though it would take you some time to understand how the drum machine worked, once you got the basics down, you could quickly have the machine playing the standard rock beat. But it’s also worth pointing out that learning that same beat on the actual drums isn’t that hard.

After my girlfriend recorded the video of me drumming, she decided that she wanted to sit in. She’d never played drums before. In fact, I don’t think she’d played an instrument since middle school. Thus, it wasn’t a shock when her brain and limbs got all twisted up while attempting to play the standard rock beat. But less than ten minutes later, she was sort of doing it. No, she wasn’t Neil Peart, but I could imagine her holding down a steady groove after a few days.