> Recently I was listening to music and doing some late night vibe coding when I had an idea. I love art and music, but unfortunately have no artistic talent whatsoever. So I wondered, maybe Claude Code does?
Do I need to read further? Seriously, everyone has talent. If you're not reaady to create things, just don't do it at all. Claude will not help you here. Be prepared to spend >400 hrs on just fiddling around, and be prepared to fail a lot. There is no shortcut.
Author of the article here. Appreciate your sentiment here, but my goal wasn’t trying to make a hit song or shortcut the obvious very significant time and effort that goes into creating any sort of art. It was meant as a fun experiment to try to highlight a feeling that we’re barely scratching the surface of the breadth of things that agentic coding may be able to tackle. I’ve been learning guitar and taking painting classes in my free time, but it’s not my profession nor something I was encouraged to do when I was young. Thanks for the comment, it’s helpful to see ways I can improve my writing style
I've got to come to the OPs defense as well. This was a remarkable demonstration of Claude performing a task thats probably very out of distribution. This would not be interesting if it were a music generation model or program, it's interesting because this is not what Claude code was explicitly trained for. The fact that it generated waveforms from scratch and built up from there is really amazing. Your cynicism was applied before even reading the article.
I've gotta come to OPs defense here. In the age of Suno indistinguishable-from-human-quality hits, this whole endeavor was an art piece and more interesting than most human OR AI music I've heard in the past year.
The medium was using the "wrong" tool for the job, which creative musicians do on a regular basis. And the output was so cool, it really felt like a relic from a different era even though it's hyper-modern.
Yes, you do need to read further. The “no artistic talent” was clearly a throwaway comment and a lighthearted excuse to play around with Claude. Not everyone wants to become a maestro.
Yeah, it's just weird to expect people to find AI-generated art interesting when the person generating it has no unique take or talent. This is the worst case where there is absolutely 0 creativity in the process and the created "art" reflects that imo.
While the author explicitly wanted Claude to be in the creative lead here, I recently also thought about how LLMs could mirror their coding abilities in music production workflows, leaving the human as the composer and the LLM as the tool-caller.
Especially with Ableton and something like ableton-mcp-extended[1] this can go quite far. After adapting it a bit to use less tokens for tool call outputs I could get decent performance on a local model to tell me what the current device settings on a given track were. Imagine this with a more powerful machine and things like "make the lead less harsh" or "make the bass bounce" set off a chain of automatically added devices with new and interesting parameter combinations to adjust to your taste.
In a way this becomes a bit like the inspiration-inducing setting of listening to a song which is playing in another room with closed doors: by being muffled, certain aspects of the track get highlighted which normally wouldn’t be perceived as prominently.
My journey started after my wife found a Ukulele on the side of the road near where I lived a few years ago and took it home. Then often when I had a short break, I started just tugging at strings, trying to fully internalize the sound of each note and how they relate... After a few months, I learned about Suno and I started uploading short tunes and made full songs out of them. I basically produced a couple of new songs each week and my Ukulele playing got a lot better and I can now do custom chords. I'm all self taught so I literally don't know any of the formal rules of music. I shun all the theory about chords and composition like chorus, bridge, outro... I just give the AI the full text and so long as the main tune is repeated enough times with appropriate variations, I'm fine with it.
TBH, as a software engineer, I was a bit surprised at how rigid music is. Isn't it supposed to be creative? Rules stand in the way of that. I try to focus purely on what sounds good. For me, even the lyrics are just about the sound of the voice, I don't really care what they say, so long as it makes a vague general statement (with multiple interpretations) and not cheesy in any way.
Because people don’t want to listen to robots. There was a radio station here in Norway caught playing AI music to save on royalties, it was not good for them.
Music is about the human experience, emotions, mistakes, accidents, discoveries.
I could listen to music by real people being vulnerable and expressing themselves, or I could listen to a computer soullessly regurgitating a stock "blues" melody with inane lyrics about a trash can. Why would I ever pick the latter?
These songs sound like royalty-free stock music at best. Bland and inoffensive, with the same uncanny and compressed quality that AI-generated images have too.
Borderline acceptable for elevator music is a long way from the paradigm shift you claim it is.
it's not art (for humans) if it's not made by a human with a human story.
AI can be used as the tool with which art is made, but not as the maker itself.
now, on the other hand, maybe AI can make it's own form of art for other AI's to consume. However, for the human, the creation of art will always need the human taste and story involved
> For complex AI generated music, tools like Suno and Udio are obviously in a different league as they're trained specifically on audio and can produce genuinely impressive results. But that's not what this experiment was about.
If you can generate a song with a two sentence prompt, so can anyone else. Music and art is only interesting when there’s originality or a point of view being expressed.
I really think art (as in art that’s made for it’s own sake, as opposed to jazzing up a PowerPoint slide or whatever) is by definition something AI will not make inroads in
I wouldn't be surprised if it has, or is currently in the process of, doing so. The results are good enough at this point that I think you could probably drop a few songs into a popular Spotify playlist and someone who didn't listen too closely would be fooled. I assume someone is already doing this.
This is why posts here that are not purely tech related have to be taken with a grain of salt. Total disconnect from what caters the tastes and preferences of most people.
No, I definitely see why people hate on AI music. I appreciate that you had fun, but these songs suuuuuck.
Claude is excellent at a few things, decent at quite a few more. Art and music are not one of these things.
Ar they good as tools to aid in the creative process if you know how to use them and have some restraint? Oh absolutely. As replacements for actual art? Oh absolutely not.
As a musician, I find there are a lot of obsessions one can succumb to that can lead to mastery. There are those who are obsessed with the body and it’s perfect positioning and movement those who indulge in extensive experimentation (trying everything), those who listen to absolutely everything, those who meditatively repeat and repeat (sometimes at glacial tempi), and then there are those who collect every musical idea they can and gift listeners with only the best treasures they encounter. AI musicianship, if it is something that can be mastered, probably would rely on some combination of the above. It’s going to suck for a while, certainly, as there hasn’t been time for someone to put in their 10000 hours
Related: ChatGPT Canvas apps can send/receive MIDI in desktop Chrome. A little easter egg. You can use it to quickly whip up an app that controls GarageBand or Ableton or your op-1 or whatever.
It can also just make sounds with tone.js directly.
I’ll take this opportunity to plug a couple of experiments I’ve not progressed any further but thought were fun:
- Using Claude as a “pair producer” in Ableton by giving it access to the Ableton remote script API so it can create patterns - this was 1 year ago so I’d be interested to see how newer models can do https://youtu.be/2WxSB75U6vg
It layers a pentatonic guitar melody with filter sweep, a saw/triangle bass, warm e-piano chords, TR-808 drums, and a sparse music box that drifts across the stereo field.
I'm blown away.
I do acknowledge the possiblity that it might be heavily plagiarized from an original composition in the training set - I wouldn't know.
I feel that people forget that even amateur (Imho) level apps like dance ejay etc exist for 20+ years.
Imho electronic music creation is for a long time not a hard solution, the problem is making something to sound good :) (and good is ofc based on everyone's taste)
Curious to see how this worked, I tried this on Deepseek using Claude Code Router, following the author’s guide, with two small changes: Make it an emo song that uses acoustic guitar (or, obviously an equivalent), and it could install one text-to-speech tool using Python.
It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which cracked me up.
Failed Sample Attempt! It hasn't failed yet, it just hasn't found its audience. It's so good. It needs to be paired with video so its abrupt transitions are more legible. There's a whole world in there. Given some exploration and iteration Claude could do some really strange, interesting things.
Very interesting experiment! I tried something related half a year ago (LLMs writing midi files, musical notation or guitar tabs), but directly creating audio with Python and sine waves is a pretty original approach.
>I love art and music, but unfortunately have no artistic talent whatsoever.
Then go pay someone to teach you to play <instrument>, and you'll get a life skill that will be satisfying to watch grow, instead of whatever this soulless crap is.
edit: Oh god after listening to those samples, send Claude to the same music teacher you choose...
ramon156|23 days ago
Do I need to read further? Seriously, everyone has talent. If you're not reaady to create things, just don't do it at all. Claude will not help you here. Be prepared to spend >400 hrs on just fiddling around, and be prepared to fail a lot. There is no shortcut.
jshchnz|23 days ago
jablongo|23 days ago
arcticfox|23 days ago
The medium was using the "wrong" tool for the job, which creative musicians do on a regular basis. And the output was so cool, it really felt like a relic from a different era even though it's hyper-modern.
reassess_blind|23 days ago
altmanaltman|23 days ago
josters|23 days ago
Especially with Ableton and something like ableton-mcp-extended[1] this can go quite far. After adapting it a bit to use less tokens for tool call outputs I could get decent performance on a local model to tell me what the current device settings on a given track were. Imagine this with a more powerful machine and things like "make the lead less harsh" or "make the bass bounce" set off a chain of automatically added devices with new and interesting parameter combinations to adjust to your taste.
In a way this becomes a bit like the inspiration-inducing setting of listening to a song which is playing in another room with closed doors: by being muffled, certain aspects of the track get highlighted which normally wouldn’t be perceived as prominently.
[1]: https://github.com/uisato/ableton-mcp-extended
jongjong|23 days ago
My journey started after my wife found a Ukulele on the side of the road near where I lived a few years ago and took it home. Then often when I had a short break, I started just tugging at strings, trying to fully internalize the sound of each note and how they relate... After a few months, I learned about Suno and I started uploading short tunes and made full songs out of them. I basically produced a couple of new songs each week and my Ukulele playing got a lot better and I can now do custom chords. I'm all self taught so I literally don't know any of the formal rules of music. I shun all the theory about chords and composition like chorus, bridge, outro... I just give the AI the full text and so long as the main tune is repeated enough times with appropriate variations, I'm fine with it.
TBH, as a software engineer, I was a bit surprised at how rigid music is. Isn't it supposed to be creative? Rules stand in the way of that. I try to focus purely on what sounds good. For me, even the lyrics are just about the sound of the voice, I don't really care what they say, so long as it makes a vague general statement (with multiple interpretations) and not cheesy in any way.
Flemlord|23 days ago
This song was generated from my 2-sentence prompt about a botched trash pickup: https://suno.com/s/Bdo9jzngQ4rvQko9
wasmainiac|23 days ago
rafram|23 days ago
I could listen to music by real people being vulnerable and expressing themselves, or I could listen to a computer soullessly regurgitating a stock "blues" melody with inane lyrics about a trash can. Why would I ever pick the latter?
bramhaag|23 days ago
Borderline acceptable for elevator music is a long way from the paradigm shift you claim it is.
giozaarour|23 days ago
codethief|23 days ago
> For complex AI generated music, tools like Suno and Udio are obviously in a different league as they're trained specifically on audio and can produce genuinely impressive results. But that's not what this experiment was about.
conception|23 days ago
Stuff like this - https://www.nme.com/news/music/ai-generated-country-track-wa...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meet-the-woman-behind-chart-top...
Etc
jjfoooo4|23 days ago
I really think art (as in art that’s made for it’s own sake, as opposed to jazzing up a PowerPoint slide or whatever) is by definition something AI will not make inroads in
olivia-banks|23 days ago
lexandstuff|23 days ago
canjobear|23 days ago
t0bia_s|23 days ago
thousand_nights|23 days ago
sdf2erf|23 days ago
kypro|23 days ago
It's not just good at producing complete songs though, AI has made it trivial to take garbage and make it sound good.
I largely stopped making music because imo unless you're in the top 5% of musicians AI is probably able to write better music than you.
I guess it's the same with visual artists. Unless you're really, really good it's hard to understand why anyone would produce art by hand these days.
smuenkel|23 days ago
Claude is excellent at a few things, decent at quite a few more. Art and music are not one of these things.
Ar they good as tools to aid in the creative process if you know how to use them and have some restraint? Oh absolutely. As replacements for actual art? Oh absolutely not.
Same goes for the entire genre of tools.
lostmsu|23 days ago
florilegiumson|23 days ago
bgirard|23 days ago
fassssst|23 days ago
It can also just make sounds with tone.js directly.
tomduncalf|23 days ago
- Using Claude as a “pair producer” in Ableton by giving it access to the Ableton remote script API so it can create patterns - this was 1 year ago so I’d be interested to see how newer models can do https://youtu.be/2WxSB75U6vg
- A Claude Code skill which teaches it how to arrange Ableton loops into songs (by modifying the XML as there isn’t an API for this): https://youtu.be/P6Zw6f6CEbI and https://youtu.be/tVZigxFceUE
r2ob|23 days ago
dandersch|23 days ago
I do acknowledge the possiblity that it might be heavily plagiarized from an original composition in the training set - I wouldn't know.
coolgoose|23 days ago
Imho electronic music creation is for a long time not a hard solution, the problem is making something to sound good :) (and good is ofc based on everyone's taste)
shortformblog|23 days ago
It double-tracked the vocals like freaking Elliott Smith, which cracked me up.
brandtcormorant|23 days ago
Marha01|23 days ago
JamesSwift|23 days ago
tuhgdetzhh|23 days ago
jonathaneunice|23 days ago
msephton|23 days ago
Trasmatta|23 days ago
viccis|23 days ago
Then go pay someone to teach you to play <instrument>, and you'll get a life skill that will be satisfying to watch grow, instead of whatever this soulless crap is.
edit: Oh god after listening to those samples, send Claude to the same music teacher you choose...