We have dreams. We dream of becoming musicians, artists, singers, or actors. But, most of us will get on with our daily grind and lament after a long journey, of dreams unfulfilled. However, with the advent of AI (artificial intelligence), we are becoming empowered to do things we may never thought possible before. One such dream is to become a composer of sorts.

I have written a book of poems and prose during my days in the army. Those days could be dreary, but there was always something to look forward to after midnight, when everyone seemed to have retired to their beds. There was a canteen with a couple of stalls still open, and the fragrance of fried noodles and eggs filled the atmosphere. I didn’t have a laptop in the 1980s of course, so writing was with pen and paper. I poured out many pages of prose and poetry, mostly about romance and life. And of course, that was that, until 2024.

There are now AI tools such as Suno and Udio, which allow any one of us to write prompts, provide our own lyrics if we like, and designate music styles and genres, and less than some minutes later, we have a song we can call our own.

I have tinkered with both Udio and Suno, and settled on Suno. Of these 2 platforms, I find Suno slightly easier to work with. But Suno is not without its own limitations and quirks, which can be frustrating to say the least.

If you just want to have fun and perhaps use Suno for advertising jingles, just use the basic mode and write prompts. Suno will generate lyrics, instrumentals and vocals all at once. The results do amaze.

But for me, I wanted to use my own lyrics, and so I had to use the Custom Mode. There are fields for Lyrics, Style of Music, and Title.

For example, if you want a song that is longer than 2 minutes, you have to go through a rather convulated “Extend” function and tinker with timing, etc. And you have to combine the segments into a “Full song”. For a platform that runs on AI, it seems almost crazy to have to do this manually at all. What were those coders thinking (and I am a coder since 1970s)? Suno really should use the AI to discern how long the lyrics run, and then complete the song in a full song, without manual human intervention.

Another weird quirk was when I placed in Chinese (in Traditional Chinese script) lyrics, the AI generator voiced it first in Mandarin, and then one of the subsequent versions, was in Cantonese (the dialect spoken in Hongkong SAR). I take it that because I used Traditional Chinese script rather than the Simplified Chinese script, the AI platform randomly decides it could either be a Taiwanese (me) or someone from Hongkong. I suppose they may need to fix this bug with tags or prompts.

For the Custom Mode, I wish Suno has perhaps a slider or field for Tempo. That would be swell for newbies and enthusiasts alike. Perhaps some of the fields can be checkboxes rather than just a text field, such as Style of Music.

Here are some songs I created with my own lyrics on Suno.

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Editor

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