Creative experiments
Music without the singing skills
Experiment / In developmentCan you make an album when you can't sing?
On this page
Where things stand
I use ChatGPT for lyrics and prompts, and Suno to make the songs. I've planned the album as a whole, written and revised lyrics, and experimented with AI-generated versions of the music.
Next, I want to develop a consistent sound across the songs and find out how I might use my own voice in the final result.
The goal is a complete album, and possibly music videos too.
I've wanted to make music, but there's one small problem: I can't really sing.
These days AI can compose, arrange and sing, though. I started wondering whether I could use it to make a whole album that sounds the way I want it to.
I don't mean asking AI for random songs and choosing the best ones. I want to decide what the songs are about, what emotions they contain and what the music sounds like.
AI can help with the execution, but I don't want it deciding what kind of music I make.
The Happy Life of an Engineer
The working title of my first album project is Insinöörin onnellinen elämä—The Happy Life of an Engineer.
It's about ordinary Finnish life: work, home, family, the seasons, small everyday moments and the idea that a good life doesn't necessarily require anything particularly grand.
I want to make music with stories. Stories in which ordinary things can matter most of all.
Musically, I've been aiming for a calm, warm sound and a low male voice. I've found that getting AI to sing exactly the way I want isn't always very easy.
What if AI could sing in my voice?
An interesting next question is whether I could sing the songs myself—even badly—and use AI to turn the performance into something that sounds good while keeping my own voice.
That's why I'm interested in local voice conversion and singing technologies.
If it worked, I might be able to make music that keeps something of my own voice and interpretation, even if my singing skills weren't enough to achieve the result I wanted.
What I've learned
AI can produce music quickly. Getting music that matches your own idea is much harder.
I've had to think about things like the rhythm of lyrics, how singable melodies are, the singer's vocal range, arrangements and how several songs become a coherent album.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this project is how many musical decisions you still have to make, even when AI handles some of the actual execution.