I signed on to Suno, the AI music app, late last year. Since then I’ve created 17 songs.
I think they’re great.
Several have already become music videos in my Pondering Eternity project, and later this month the songs themselves will begin appearing on Spotify and other streaming platforms.
But there’s a question that keeps hovering over the whole thing.
Am I a musician?
My résumé suggests otherwise.
My mother forced me to take piano lessons. I sang in school choirs. I played trombone for a while in high school. My father showed me a few guitar chords. Somewhere back in grade school I sang Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley in a school concert.
That’s about the extent of my formal training.
In the craft sense, I’m clearly not a musician. I couldn’t sit down at a keyboard and play these songs. I couldn’t step on stage and perform them with a band. I don’t know how to build a harmony or arrange an orchestration.
No cross-country band tour is in my future.
And yet these 17 songs exist.
They exist because I wrote the lyrics and learned how to coax a musical setting out of this strange new instrument called AI.
The process is not as simple as typing a prompt and walking away. Suno generates two versions each time. But the first attempts are rarely right. None of these songs were finished after a single pass.
To produce the 17 finished tracks required nearly 400 iterations. Four hundred and eighteen, to be exact, though a few of those belong to songs still in progress.
You begin to hear the pattern after a while.
You search for the musical style that settles into the words. You adjust the tempo. Change the mood. Try again.
And again.
It reminds me a lot of painting.
One more color. One more brushstroke. One more small adjustment that might ruin everything or suddenly make the whole thing work.
The difference is that with Suno every change starts the performance over from the beginning. You never quite know what the next version will sound like.
Which means the real work becomes listening.
I’ve always loved music. My tastes wander all over the map. Dance, Afro-beat, folk, blues, soul, gospel, classical, jazz, rock. There aren’t many styles I dismiss outright. And I have enormous respect for musicians who devote their lives to mastering their craft. Live performance, especially, is something AI will never replace. Those craftsmen will always be valued.
But still the question remains.
Am I a musician?
I cannot perform these songs. I cannot play them. I cannot stand on stage and reproduce them note for note.
But the songs exist.
They carry words and moods and ideas that were once only fragments in my head. Now they move through melody and rhythm and travel into the world where they may or may not move someone else.
And perhaps that is the real test.
Not the instrument.
Not the method.
But whether the finished work communicates something that wasn’t there before.
Seventeen songs now exist that would not exist without this strange collaboration between human curiosity and an artificial instrument.
The songs are there.
And I suspect I’ll keep making them for the rest of my life.