David (00:00)
What do we want it to be? Do we want it to be EDM? What kind of style? 80s?

Ilan (00:04)
now it's more it's

more like 80s synth pop

David (00:09)
Hahaha

Hey everybody, this is Prompt and Circumstance. My name's David.

Ilan (00:15)
And I'm Ilan.

David (00:16)
And today we're going to make a new theme song.

All right. So what's happening is that we are using what is called royalty free music in our podcast. And that sometimes gets flagged as a copyright because it is, you know, somebody else's work, but they just let us use it for free. And that made me think maybe we ought to just generate our own music.

Ilan (00:56)
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David (01:25)
And this is, this is tied with the fact that Suno

which is an AI music making application, was recently valued at $2.45 billion in the most recent round of a quarter billion dollars.

Ilan (01:41)
Yeah, it's pretty incredible numbers. I will note that was post-money valuation. So it's more like 2.2.

David (01:48)
That's true. Yes.

So I thought, hey, let's go try this out and see how it goes. So what did I do first? Well, I looked up what makes for a good Suno prompt. And so what we all should be doing when using a system like this,

Ilan (02:05)
Mm-hmm.

David (02:10)
is go and look for good sources that would help guide your understanding and perhaps an LLM's understanding of what makes for a good prompt. So, Suno, you don't prompt it like you would GPT or Gemini or Claude. It's different. Well, because it's very geared towards making music. And so it has certain expectations in terms of ⁓ certain keywords, things that you would say.

Ilan (02:27)
Why's that?

Mm-hmm.

David (02:38)
And it really takes things literally apparently. ⁓ and so I think being more precise with the language is going to be important here.

Ilan (02:46)
I do think this is something in general that people should think about. The more we use AI, yes, the frontier models will be able to work around the understanding of what exactly do you mean, but in general you get better results the more precise your language is and

English is the richest language in the world. So there is almost certainly a word out there that precisely means what you want to say. And finding that exact word can make a big difference for getting the results that you want from any LLM. But I'm curious to see how that goes with Suno.

David (03:24)
Yeah, no, that's very true. mean, with image generation, for example, there are certain key terms that come from photography that somebody might really want to know if they want to generate exactly the image they want. Terms like bokeh, y'know, to generate that kind of portrait effect. So let's have a look at how this goes.

Ilan (03:33)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

David (03:44)
What do we want it to be? Do we want it to be EDM? What kind of style? 80s?

Ilan (03:48)
now it's more it's

more like 80s synth pop . would describe the vibe as

David (03:53)
Hahaha

Ilan (04:01)
upbeat lo-fi hip-hop

whose uncle is EDM.

David (04:06)
All right, so we're going to ask NotebookLM for a prompt for an introduction song of length 30 seconds. It's a lo fi hip hop song blended with EDM characteristics. Now here I've got all these different sources of what works well. They all come from websites. And in fact, there's also one YouTube video there where somebody walks through that. So let's see how this goes.

Ilan (04:19)
Alright.

David (04:33)
So, all right, so here it's given us a table of all the different parts of the song. I gotta say, I didn't actually read ⁓ these articles a whole lot. ⁓ So I don't know if I just copy paste the various different sections together or what. Look, why don't we hop into Suno and see what our options are.

Ilan (04:43)
Hahaha! ⁓

Sounds good.

David (04:56)
All right, so here we are in Suno and I've created our account for Prompt and Circumstance. I like how the username @pandcpodcast was available.

Ilan (05:05)
This is giving Spotify.

David (05:08)
Yeah, yeah, that makes that certainly makes a lot of sense. All right, let's come here and go to create. So we're going to create a song presumably. All right, so there's a song description. And here we have the 65 credits that we've got. And so I can either do simple or custom. Oh, look at that. So if I do custom, I can control.

The audio, the lyrics, persona, inspiration, styles. And then there's some advanced options here as well. Vocal gender, lyrics mode and so on. Weirdness. How weird do you want the song to be? Okay. Well, let's, let's go back to. Yeah, exactly. let's go back to what we've got here. So there's meta tags and I'm trying to figure out where we put that in the genre.

Ilan (05:40)
Sounds like temperature.

You

David (05:52)
think it's it would be in the styles area.

Yeah, so there's styles here, which is just everything in comma separated. all right, well, know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna just dump this into here. So genre is Lo-Fi, chill wave, melodic house, hybrid. The mood is warm, cinematic and atmospheric. Tempo is 88 beats per minute. Vocal style, actually I don't want vocals.

Ilan (06:01)
Mm-hmm.

You

David (06:15)
Can I just, I'll just remove that.

Ilan (06:17)
Maybe just write, no vocals.

David (06:19)
Okay.

I still don't know vocals.

Ilan (06:21)
Or maybe instrumental. Yeah.

David (06:21)
I feel like I say instrumental. Yeah, there you go.

All right. I'll just say instrumental. Energy/structure is slow build punchy drop. I like that. All right. punchy drop. Yes. Song title. Let's say Prompt and Circumstance.

Ilan (06:34)
Love a punchy drop.

theme.

David (06:42)
Okay, Prompt and Circumstance intro theme. Now, the NotebookLM gave me a lot more here that I'm not sure where I put it. There's an intro, there's a build and then there's a drop.

Ilan (06:47)
Hmm.

I go back to Suno. Yeah. ⁓ I see. I needed to be a pro.

David (06:57)
The stuff up here is for me to upload. ⁓

And you need to be a pro.

Ilan (07:02)
Alright, well let's just see what happens with this.

David (07:04)
Okay. All right. Let's see how this goes.

Ilan (07:07)
⁓ One thing I've noticed, it looks like they've fixed it now, or it's at least doing a little bit better now. In the past with Suno, you'd click create and nothing would happen in the UI to indicate that ⁓ it was processing your request. Now it seems like you click it once and it gives you four different results.

David (07:27)
Yeah, and I noticed that that two of these are a V5 preview. Now our model selection was V4.5 all, which is apparently the best free model. These things still seem to be generating. I see a spinner here. Let's see if I can play anything.

Ilan (07:40)
Mm-hmm.

David (07:57)
That's not bad. I think we should shorten these things up so that the drop comes sooner.

Ilan (07:58)
That's not bad.

David (08:11)
Not as punchy of a drop as I would like, yeah. All right, well, let's see what this, yeah, let's see how this goes.

Ilan (08:11)
I like the first one better. Yeah. What about those V5?

David (08:27)
I like that.

Ilan (08:28)
I like that too.

David (08:30)
All right, last one.

Ilan (08:42)
This one doesn't quite crescendo in the same way.

David (08:46)
I was hoping for a drop somewhere. guess, I guess I missed it. So, I mean, number three really that to me was the winner.

Ilan (08:55)
Yeah, to me that was the winner followed closely by number one.

David (08:58)
Yeah, yeah, I'd say so.

Ilan (08:59)
So if we

wanted to download that so that we could use it going forward, it looks like we'd have to upgrade.

David (09:06)
Well, we gotta upgrade for the full song. Joke's on them, we only want half of it.

Ilan (09:10)
Hahaha!

David (09:12)
Okay, well hang on, I clicked into the song. here's to the download button. Downloads MP3.

Do we not want commercial rights? Anybody can use it. It's Look at that.

Ilan (09:21)
Yeah.

You can all be Prompt and Circumstance

David (09:24)
I think I was able to grab it.

Yeah, I got it.

Ilan (09:28)
Amazing.

David (09:29)
So there we go. We have a new intro theme. Let's poke around Suno a little bit more. There's something really interesting here that I found And that has to do with the fact that, well, we have a limited number of credits. So we burned 10 credits making those four songs.

Ilan (09:38)
Mm-hmm.

Doesn't seem that bad. How much do credits cost?

David (09:47)
⁓

Let's have a look.

So if you want 2,500 credits, which is 500 songs, and that's 11 bucks a month if you pay annually. That's not bad. That's pretty

Ilan (09:57)
Got it.

Mm-hmm.

David (10:00)
What I ⁓ thought was interesting is that here, if you want to earn more credits, you can come here to listen and rank.

And this is the HF of the RLHF, suppose. So human feedback. you can see here that what you can do is listen for credits, as in you compare two versions of the same song that Suno has generated. You let it know which one's better. And by giving that human feedback, you get five credits, which is, guess, good enough for

A song, one minute song. So here's how it looks like.

All right, so we've got two clips, clip A.

Okay, and now here's clip B.

And then you go ahead and you choose which one is better. Now you can keep listening to them over and over again. Maybe we can say that B is better. There we go. So select B submit. And then we go, we have we're to have five credits pending once we're done here. So it's going to automatically move you on to the next song. So coming back here, five credits pending.

Ilan (11:12)
Hey, that's not bad.

David (11:13)
That's pretty good. mean, you know, imagine if Lovable or Replit did something similar where you would vote on different versions of the same site.

Ilan (11:23)
Yeah, it's very cool and a great way to create a viral loop for somebody without necessarily charging them money, but still getting value from them. You know, we've talked about in a previous episode with Sefunmi about a value exchange from a product and the customer. And here the product is getting your feedback for song you might never have listened to.

And meanwhile you get another song that you can create.

David (11:52)
Yeah, that's right.

So that's Suno. I thought that was really interesting. Let's try it out. See how that song goes as part of our podcast.

Ilan (12:02)
David, we should mention briefly about controversy surrounding Suno from the music industry. I think you've talked about this in the past. You know what's going on?

David (12:13)
Yeah, so it wouldn't be surprising if Suno trained their models using copywritten music. Is that what you're getting at? Yeah.

Ilan (12:21)
That's right.

Yeah,

so they've actually been sued by the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA, on behalf of Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Records for copyright infringement. And specifically, part of the claim says that they stream ripped music from platforms like YouTube. So they basically played these songs in YouTube, grabbed the audio from them, and then used

that audio to train their models without giving any credit or money to the artists. I will say that this may be a bit rich coming from ⁓ Sony Music, Warner Records, and Universal Music Group who ⁓ don't necessarily have the greatest records of treating artists ⁓ as fairly as possible across their whole histories, ⁓ but in general

even if ⁓ there's record labels trying to keep money in their own pockets, some of that would eventually go back to the artists. And that was actually the big unlock for Spotify, ⁓ you know, 10 years ago was not the technology for people to stream audio online, but actually how do you attribute some of that listen back to the record industry and to the artists who created the songs.

David (13:41)
Yeah, it makes me think about the image generating models when they got really good this year and how they were able to create very close to infringing images, right? Like, ⁓ you know, we think about the Miyazaki style ⁓ and, you know, things like, ⁓ like Nintendo characters.

Ilan (13:49)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

David (14:09)
So this is across the board with all of these AI tools.

Ilan (14:14)
Yeah,

one funny story is that in ⁓ Sora, the image generation app from ChatGPT using Sora 2 as the model, I had a warning come up for potential copyright infringement for a prompt that I gave it saying that this seemed like it was close to some copyrighted material. So...

I added the word original to my prompt and that completely bypassed the copyright protection.

David (14:47)
Maybe, maybe the, the copyright

protection is AI driven. And so it sees that word in there. yeah. Yeah. I guess so. Sounds right to me.

Ilan (14:52)
That's right.

Mm-hmm.

David (14:56)
yeah, so ⁓ that wraps it for this episode.

Ilan (15:00)
All right. Well, with that, you can always leave us a like and a review. It really helps out the podcast and we'll see you next week.

David (15:07)
See you next time.