A Musician for Poetry
Suno the AI makes music. It will take text you offer it, and the style you request, and turn it into a fully orchestrated, vocally performed song.
Since I have a lot of poetry, I had to try it. In the rest of this article I will speak of me, but please try it yourself at suno.com .
For free at this writing you can get five songs a day. Each comes in two versions = ten songs. It is worth signing in, so that Suno will keep a library for you. If you join one of the for-pay plans the rights to the songs will belong to you.
There is a “create” choice in the menu on the home page and the library page. When you click on it, a sidebar opens. In it you can paste your text — Suno will offer to write for you, if you wish, but you can enter any text for which you have the rights. You choose the music style. Suno may or may not obey your choices, which is part of the fun. Give your song a title.
Then Suno will spend a few moments and give you two versions of what you have asked for. You can listen to them, extend them, delete them, put them in a playlist and make them public or not. Each has a small picture to go with it, also AI generated.
And what do I love?
- The music is good with feeling-filled voices -
I got a bluesman’s voice…
… an Appalachian voice
a Renaissance chorus singing in Latin and English.
Not only the accents, but the attitudes that are characteristic of those cultures came through. The feelings of awe and delight and sadness and gratitude and blessing that animate the voices seem real. When you want a bilingual protest about the cruelty of border politics, you can get Texmex cowboy voices (with a Texan accent when they switch to Spanish).
I truly wonder how an AI does this, but Suno has found a way.
- The system is good with many languages as well as musical styles.
I was able to work in English, Latin, Spanish, Sanskrit, and (thanks to a scholar friend) Chinese from the Tao Te Ching written in characters.
- I focus on a few folkloric modes, but there is an “explore” option, where you can hear and choose voices and styles and languages from a spinning wheel of options — from heavy metal to Beethoven.
- I swear Suno recognizes mood in texts and incorporates it into the songs. A strange poem about “Lord Hungry Ghost” was performed with a straight face and a grimly funny Suno-generated graphic.
When I wrote a tongue-in-cheek piece about my bagpipe skills, Suno recognized that in the lines “visit an old folks home and not play” the “not” needed to be accented and did so in both voice and instrumental parts.
Most intriguing to me is “After she wrote her poems, won her prize.” It is an intricate story about a woman who has just won an award for her poetry. A reporter seeks out her inspiration, her “Mr. Muse,” and interviews him. The music Suno created is a half-chanted narrative. Just before the denouement, Suno inserted a bridge and then did the reveal. How did Suno know?
You are welcome to explore all my songs at
https://suno.com/@cascadingchurchchoirs872. But it is even more fun to collect some texts, your own or right-free (I used Shelley’s Ozymandias as a safely public-domain but difficult test case), and try out suno.com for yourself.
You can find my printed writings at btwreviews.com .
