Once you click on on the Spotify profile of Intelligent Band Machine you will notice a picture of three younger males staring moodily again into the digital camera. Their profile confirms that they’re a “British band,” “influenced by the post-punk scene,” and attempting to seize the spirit of bands like The Treatment “whereas carving out their very own distinctive sound.” Once you take heed to their music you is perhaps reminded of Pleasure Division’s Ian Curtis.
If you happen to dig a bit deeper and examine them on their record label’s page one can find that Cameron is the lead singer, and his musical tastes had been formed by the live shows he attended at Nottingham’s Rock Metropolis nightclub. Tyler, the drummer, was certainly impressed by The Treatment, in addition to U2, and The Smiths, whereas guitarist, Antonio, blends his Italian mom’s love of basic Italian folks songs along with his British father’s ardour for The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.
What these profiles don’t say is that Clever Band Machine will not be actual, not less than not within the human sense. And I ought to know, as a result of I created them.
I used a spread of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) instruments, in addition to my expertise as knowledgeable songwriter and sound engineer to make their debut album, “Welcome to NTU,” and I launched it on my devoted AI file label, XRMeta Records, in Could 2025.
You may ask why an independently releasing singer-songwriter and music producer like me would create a man-made band. In addition to being a musician, I’m an academic with a background in laptop science, finishing up analysis about how GenAI can be utilized for music.
I had reservations about these instruments and the way they may have an effect on me as a musician. I had heard about numerous AI controversies, like “pretend” Drake, and artists like Grimes embracing GenAI in 2023. So, I used to be additionally intrigued by the probabilities.
Over 100 million folks have tried Suno, an AI music technology platform that may create songs with vocals and instrumentation from easy textual content prompts. Greater than 100 million tracks have been created utilizing the Mubert API, which permits streaming to platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, and Instagram. And in response to Deezer, 28 % of launched music is totally AI-generated.
It was time for me to research what these instruments might do. That is the story of how I experimented with GenAI and was remodeled from a dance artist to a post-punk gentle rock band.
GenAI Has Modified Every part
In my early days of songwriting, one of many first items of apparatus I purchased was a Panasonic RQ-2745, a small, slim moveable cassette tape recorder that allowed me to file tough drafts of vocals on an audio cassette tape.
When low cost merchandise just like the Sony cfs-w30 boombox started to include double cassette decks, I might overdub songs and add choruses or devices, like flute or guitar, at dwelling. If I needed a top quality recording, I needed to e-book a recording studio. I grew to become an professional at splicing tape to take away vocal elements from the tape recording or to repair tape jams.
Slicing and taping grew to become chopping and pasting as I experimented with the very early free digital music sequencers that had been included on a disk I discovered on the quilt of a PC journal. I felt liberated when sequencers like Cubase, Professional Instruments, and Logic allowed high-quality recordings to be produced at dwelling. This, together with the numerous discount in the price of studio gear, led to the emergence of the bed room producer and the proliferation of the 808 sound. This deep, booming bass line may be heard in hits like “It’s Difficult” by RUN DMC, “Emergency Room” by Rihanna, and “Drunk in Love” by Beyoncé.
Digital distribution and social media then paved the best way for self-releasing impartial artists like me to speak immediately with followers, promote music, and bypass file labels.
But throughout all of those modifications, musicians nonetheless wanted the talents and data to create their songs. Like many musicians, I honed my expertise over a number of years, studying to play the guitar, flute, and piano and growing sound-engineering expertise. Even when AI-powered instruments started to be integrated into digital audio workstations, a musician’s talent and data was nonetheless wanted to make use of these instruments successfully.
Having the ability to create music from textual content prompts modified this.
Not for the reason that introduction of music streaming providers within the late Nineties has there been such a dramatic shift in music composition and listening applied sciences. Now non-musicians can create studio-quality music in minutes with out the in depth coaching that I had and with out having to purchase devices or studio gear.
Now anybody can do that. It was time for me to be taught what these instruments might do.
I sometimes produce RnB/neo soul, nu-jazz, and dance music, though I can write songs for a number of genres of music. For the experiment, I needed to strive a style that I don’t normally produce music for.
I examined about 60 completely different GenAI instruments and platforms. These included standalone instruments that target one activity, like MIDI technology (musical knowledge that may be performed again on a keyboard or music sequencer). I additionally tried AI music studios. These platforms have user-friendly interfaces that mix a spread of AI instruments to assist lyric, music, picture, and video creation.
Suno and Udio had been two of one of the best platforms. They’ll generate songs with advanced vocal melodies and harmonies throughout a spread of genres, with one of the best outputs being tough to tell apart from what human musicians can create. Each Telisha “Nikki” Jones and music mogul Timbaland are mentioned to have used Suno to create music for his or her AI-generated artists.
In June 2025, Timbaland introduced the signing of his AI artist TaTa to his devoted AI file label, Stage Zero. In September 2025 Jones was reported to have signed a $3 million cope with Hallwood Media for her AI-generated artist Xania Monet.
On the time of my experiment in March/April 2025, each Suno and Udio had points, akin to silence gaps, tempo modifications, inconsistent vocal high quality, and variations in style. Typically the voice may change throughout the music. There was restricted management by way of modifying, and the audio high quality might fluctuate inside a single monitor or throughout a collection of songs.
After attempting a number of GenAI music platforms I made a decision to make use of Udio because of the high quality of its output and its favorable phrases and situations at the moment. Taking inspiration from pop-rock and post-punk bands like Pleasure Division and The Treatment, I began the journey in the direction of creating a brand new persona.
Utilizing GenAI to provide one or two good songs was fairly easy. Producing an album of 14 songs that sounded as in the event that they had been performed by the identical band was tougher, significantly producing the identical male voice and musical fashion for every music.
The songs had been both far too comparable to one another or had different points, such because the voice altering or the devices sounding too completely different. A cautious take heed to the songs in Unfolded by the AI artist Xania Monet will reveal comparable inconsistencies. For instance, you’ll be able to hear a distinction within the voice that’s generated for the primary music, “This Aint No Tryout,” in comparison with “Back When Love Was Real.”
GenAI Can’t Write (First rate) Lyrics
My first activity was to create the lyrics. I generated about 1,000 songs utilizing Udio and located repeated phrases and phrases within the lyrics like “neon,” “whisper,” and “we’re, we’re, we’re,” showing each inside and throughout the 2 consumer accounts I created. Themes like darkness, shadows, and light-weight had been additionally repeated throughout the lyrics for a big variety of songs.
GenAI simply couldn’t write lyrics with the complexity or playfulness I wanted, so I selected to write down the lyrics for the album myself and used a semi-autobiographical narrative. This allowed me to keep up a narrative throughout the album; from arriving at Nottingham Trent College and settling into pupil lodging to experiencing college life, graduating and leaving.
I might interweave present affairs just like the closure of Nottingham’s Victoria Centre Market within the music “Goodbye Vicky Market.” I included traces that referenced Nottingham’s historic figures like Alan Sillitoe, who wrote “The Loneliness of the Lengthy Distance Runner,” and the creator D.H. Lawrence within the music, “Books.”
After writing the lyrics I generated the music. There have been points with immediate adherence. I examined prompts of various lengths. In some circumstances, prompts had been partly or wholly ignored. I’d write a immediate asking for one style and a unique style can be produced.
There have been additionally points with the artificial voice announcing a few of the lyrics. For instance, it couldn’t pronounce “NTU” or “Sillitoe,” and I needed to rewrite a few of the lyrics phonetically or edit the audio to get the right pronunciation for sure phrases.
I relied on my sound engineering expertise, extending the outputs, modifying, mixing, remixing, and manually recording vocals in Cubase to attain a coherent last combine. This took a big period of time. In actual fact, modifying the Udio outputs took a lot time, it will have been simpler to recreate the music myself. I can write a music in 10 minutes, and I typically file myself freestyling lyrics for a complete music immediately in Cubase, so this was irritating.
I encountered comparable points with immediate adherence when producing pictures and video. When utilizing Kling AI to create pictures of the band members, I adopted its immediate engineering information. Nevertheless, I needed to generate a whole lot of pictures and edit them with exterior instruments to attain the ultimate band photographs.
Producing video was equally difficult. One method to create a video is to add a photograph, which turns into the primary body. The remainder of the video is generated primarily based on the immediate. Nevertheless, after I uploaded Cameron’s profile picture to Kling AI, the preliminary frames of the 10-second video resembled him. However by the tip of the video, Cameron typically morphed into another person, and this occurred regularly when producing video.
Prompts for digital camera directions, akin to zoom and pan, had been regularly ignored. I additionally needed to edit out scenes with different issues, akin to the looks of additional fingers or an extra leg on the band members.
All this wasn’t low cost both. With 8,000 Kling AI credit at a value of $64.99, I might generate about 40 ten-second movies, however many had been unusable.
Music technology is cheaper. Paying between $24 and $30 for a month-to-month subscription may enable a consumer to create between 2,000 and three,000 songs, relying on how the credit are used. I used to be very stunned to find how shortly these music credit may be consumed. Each error or music that didn’t swimsuit my style nonetheless price credit.
Finally, after producing 1000’s of songs, a whole lot of pictures and movies utilizing instruments like Duck.ai to create the band’s biographies, and spending many hours modifying the outputs; Cameron, Tyler ,and Antonio started to emerge because the band.
AI-generated band Clever Band Machine: Antonio, Cameron, and Tyler. Picture Credit score: Priscilla Angelique-Web page
One thing Sudden Occurred
I’ve at all times been obsessed with creating my very own music. As a lot as I really like writing songs, the poor royalty payouts I used to be receiving had turn into disheartening. A music I recorded in 2001 and launched in 2011 known as Only Heaven Can Compare was streamed about 1 million instances in France throughout 2024 however I solely acquired about £21 in royalties.
Previous to streaming, had my music been downloaded by simply 10,000 folks, I’d have been paid about £6,900 (69 pence per obtain). Artists like Kate Nash have raised issues in regards to the poor royalty payouts to musicians, citing her £500,000 payout for over 100 million performs of her music “Foundations.”
However as I created the band’s album one thing sudden began to occur. I started to get pleasure from creating music once more. The frustrations with utilizing GenAI was balanced by surprise and curiosity.
At instances Udio was in a position to generate vocals that had been so reasonable I might hardly consider they had been created by an AI mannequin. There have been moments after I laughed, after I was actually moved, and even had chills after I heard a few of the songs.
Lyrics that after lay dormant in a number of lever arch recordsdata on my bookshelf started to search out new life by these generative instruments, permitting me to quickly check them throughout a number of genres.
I made a decision to take this experiment additional.
After fastidiously deciding on a set of songs I had written a few years in the past, I created a brand new persona, Jake Davy Smith. For his 14-track album, known as I’ll Be Right Here, which was launched on November 22, 2025, I used Suno’s v5 mannequin to generate studio-quality music that matched my unique imaginative and prescient.
Suno’s in depth modifying instruments enable customers to add vocals, create a canopy music, and edit the music, lyrics, or voice with larger precision than their earlier fashions. This helped me almost recreate my unique songs. The monitor “Calling” is an instance of a rock ballad I wrote years in the past, recorded, and didn’t launch.
Conflicting Feelings
Reflecting on this experiment, I discovered myself with conflicting views about utilizing GenAI. These instruments are quick and reasonably priced (in some circumstances, utterly free). They’ll produce on the spot outcomes. I now have instruments that I can use to shortly reimagine my outdated songs.
I can use a number of personas to deliver my lyrics to life. I’m Priscilla Angelique. I’m Clever Band Machine. I’m Jake Davy Smith. I’m Moombahtman 25, a male African American moombahton artist who combines hip hop with Latin American beats, and I’ve many extra personas.
I’m a “a number of persona musician” or MPM, a time period I’ve created to outline my new musical identification. Musicians having alter egos isn’t new, however GenAI has utterly modified how that is performed.
Nevertheless, there’s one other facet to this. Human musicians are actually having to compete with algorithms able to producing high-quality music at scale—in addition to with one another.
These instruments are enhancing quickly, and the problems I skilled when utilizing Udio to create the album for Clever Band Machine in March/April 2025 have already been addressed in Suno’s v5 model. It’s now simpler to create a persona with a constant voice. Customers can add their very own songs and in addition create cowl variations of their songs.
Creating the album for Clever Band Machine took about one month and there have been a number of points with attempting to create constantly sounding high-quality, AI-generated songs. I spent hours reviewing 1000’s of outputs after which extra time modifying the ultimate set of curated songs in Cubase.
My expertise was very completely different after I created the album for Jake Davy Smith. I used lyrics I had already written, generated between 5 and 20 variations of every music, and spent far much less time modifying them. The method was sooner, nonetheless, there have been nonetheless some points. Modifications in Jake’s voice occurred, although they had been much less frequent and simpler to appropriate. There have been additionally issues with pronunciation, however I might now shortly regenerate the audio. In essence, what had beforehand taken a month now took solely per week.
Moral Points and Information Assortment
But beneath this lies an additional inner battle associated to the information used to coach these AI fashions or, as music journalist Richard Smirke describes it, “the biggest IP theft in human historical past.” It’s this problem that has made a expertise that should have been celebrated as one of many largest technological achievements in many years, probably the most contested as a substitute.
Chatbots like ChatGPT, estimated to have almost 1 billion users worldwide, have been described by the linguist and activist Noam Chomsky as each “marvels of machine studying” and the “banality of evil.” Picture mills like OpenAI’s DALL-E have additionally come below fireplace. Critics like Ted Chiang problem whether or not AI could make artwork and different commentators have criticized the shortage of cultural diversity in picture technology.
Along with this, in 2024 the UK government introduced it was contemplating an exception to copyright legislation that might enable trade to make use of copyrighted works for AI coaching with out compensating the creators. This led to protests. Greater than 1,000 musicians launched a silent album known as Is This What We Want in protest in opposition to unauthorized AI coaching. The artists included Kate Bush, Annie Lennox, Damon Albarn, and The Conflict.
Elton John and Paul McCartney additionally voiced their opposition to modifications in copyright legislation that might profit AI corporations. The thriller about whether or not a band known as The Velvet Sundown was AI-generated added gas to the fireplace and sparked additional debate throughout the summer time of 2025.
But AI corporations have been successful, or not less than partially successful, courtroom circumstances. In November 2025, Getty Photographs “misplaced its declare for secondary infringement of copyright” in opposition to Stability AI. Different AI corporations are making offers, and this consists of Udio and Suno’s current offers with music corporations. Nevertheless, extra different platforms are rising. Klay.vision is negotiating with the massive labels previous to launching, and Soundraw solely makes use of music created in-house for AI coaching.
So GenAI is right here to remain, and musicians might want to adapt. Library music, background music, and music for social media or movie can simply be created with AI. Nevertheless, there are dangers. The danger that comparable music could also be generated for different customers; the chance that any uploaded songs could also be used for coaching knowledge. Then there’s the chance that these instruments could inadvertently generate one thing that breaches another person’s IP.
A technique for musicians to securely use GenAI is by coaching fashions utilizing their very own knowledge, as YACHT did once they used their again catalog of songs as coaching knowledge for a brand new album. On this means musicians can have full management over the outputs. That is one thing I will probably be exploring for the subsequent stage of my analysis.
What AI Can’t Do
My transformation has been something however easy. It has been marked by the deep frustration I encountered when initially utilizing these instruments, an ongoing battle about how these instruments are educated, and moments of real amazement. The albums I created could also be imperfect, however they’re a transparent departure from my standard fashion and present how GenAI can assist musical creativity.
Priscilla Angelique-Web page aka Priscilla Angelique, carrying an AI-generated jacket and shirt. Picture Credit score: Priscilla Angelique-Web page
Financially, the albums are unlikely to recoup the price of creating them, as impartial musicians might have a whole lot of tens of millions of streams to earn an honest earnings from music. Even a number of million streams of the songs will barely cowl the varied charges for music, picture, and video technology of round £140. Merchandise, licensing, sync offers, and different income streams will possible stay vital sources of earnings for musicians, whether or not they’re human or AI-generated.
On the authorized facet, one attainable means ahead is for AI corporations to make open-source variations of their fashions freely obtainable for offline use. Some have already got, however for those who haven’t, it appears honest that if they’ve used our knowledge to construct these techniques, they need to enable broader entry to the fashions themselves.
New applied sciences may change how music is produced. Now we have gone from clapping to drumming and from utilizing drum machines in recording studios to producing “new” sounds with AI. But now that I’ve accomplished these experiments, I understand that one factor stays the identical.
Whether or not I’m chopping tape utilizing scissors, chopping and pasting in a sequencer like Cubase, or regenerating elements in an AI music studio like Suno, human creativity remains to be a vital a part of the method. Utilizing GenAI was transformative, but it was my inventive choices that formed the songs, the albums, the avatars for my personas, their biographies, and the general imaginative and prescient. That is one thing that AI can not do – not less than, not for now.
This text is republished from The Conversation below a Inventive Commons license. Learn the original article.
