Songwriting--Then Versus Now
It's interesting to reflect on what I'm doing now with AI compared to what I used to do. I've kept a lyric journal since around 1990, and a lyric could take months or years. Now it's almost too easy to write songs. The nice side effect is that we can listen to music during the writing process, not unlike having a TTS voice read something back to you--which is very helpful in finding the "music" in it. If you write songs with a guitar or piano (sometimes a bass), the playback process is glacially slow and involves finishing a lyric and making a demo. Now you get mastered recordings in a minute. But in fact, they are still only demos masquerading as finished songs.
The old-fashioned demo done in a studio is vastly different because it's a song that's reached the stage of being performed. AI music isn't a performance at all. You discover this by interacting with it and realizing its flaws. But it is the new kind of "radio" that you can play along with, but it's a different kind of playback. AI music is sometimes difficult to transcribe because the melodies defy bar lines, as they roam around them.
But it's a new world for the songwriter.
Those just starting out with AI will never know the old way of slogging through the process, but ultimately is the better way because it's more enriching and you have more interesting options. AI music is a rapid prototyping, not really writing--although the re-writing process is rapid as well: You can have 10 demos to choose from when deciding on the final version. That final version used to be the one that was published as sheet music, but now that doesn't matter because a human was never really in the (musical) loop, other than what the lyrics and prompts produced. You'd have to take your final and make an actual demo--then transcribe that, and then it's real music because it can be performed by humans.
Here's 30 songs created since 2024. If they all took a minute to generate (most from existing lyrics), they'd be recorded. mixed and mastered in about 2 days. Most of these sound terrible and are "slop" in that regard, but I must admit I like them. Are they "me" in a musical sense? No. Would I want to make demos of all these by playing all the parts? No. But I think that process would be interesting to demonstrate that there's really no there there in AI music. If you try noodling around on these, you'll realize that.
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