Don’t buy these albums. I’ve never said that in a review before, I have far more albums I like in my queue to bother reviewing any that I don’t. But this album represents an existential threat to working musicians, especially in genre fields like traditional jazz. A full album of AI Christmas Jazz would not have been possible just last year. Now some AI music is good enough to pass for human in a background setting. By next Christmas all of it will be.
While I welcome our AI overlords I would rather direct them towards curing cancer and solving nuclear fusion than putting jazz bassists out of work at Christmastime. Once we have all lost our day jobs it would be nice to think we still had music as a fallback.
The areas AI music will invade first have been the bread and butter of working jazz musicians ever since rock hit the scene: movie and TV scores and scoring. Need a symphonic theme for your film? Don’t ask John Williams or Elmer Bernstein to gather up a band, ask your AI assistant to make you ten to choose from and have them ready in seconds. For decades when a pop star needed the sound of a jazz instrument to complete a track they would call up someone who benefited greatly from those gigs, sometimes for years to come. The next generation of pop stars, if they are not AI themselves, will use AI to generate “saxophone sound” or “walking bass.” People will always put a premium on human creation, but these side hustles are often what paid the bills for career musicians.
I admit to my own contradictions here. One thing I imagine our new Syncopated Media nonprofit doing is creating TikToks and reels to teach jazz history. We would be using AI tools to do that are rapidly putting graphic designers out of business. “Go do serious art instead” isn’t an answer for craftspeople in artistic fields, be they writers, musicians, or visual artists. For all but a few it was the craft that paid the bills. Many brilliant jazz musicians put in workmanlike performances throughout long careers without creating new work or leading a band. But we need(ed) them.
People easily recognize the utility of AI image generation as a tool. It’s like Photoshop but without needing to learn Photoshop to get the results you want. The people who are excited about AI music think of it the same way, as a creative tool. Suno, the AI that was used to make these Christmas albums, has the following mission statement:
“Suno is building a future where anyone can make great music. Whether you’re a shower singer or a charting artist, we break barriers between you and the song you dream of making. No instrument needed, just imagination. From your mind to music.”
I don’t think they have fulfilled the mission yet, the results aren’t even close to what you had in mind. But it is coming fast. Already people are creating funny songs as responses to each other in some online spaces. I have no problem with that usage or the creatives who are using AI tools to craft parody songs in various genres to troll the YouTube masses. Those usually involve a lot of human input and a nuanced understanding of humor for the fine tuning. Somewhere tonight there is an eight year old telling her tablet to write a “K Pop song about why my brother is a poopy head,” then waving the tablet at said brother. For her, AI making music on command will seem no more unusual than a calculator to an ’80s kid.
To create a song with Suno you provide a descriptive prompt. For example, “1940s jazz revival song about blue jays, bright, male lead, heavy trombone.” In a few seconds you get back two different recordings of a new composition, vaguely within the style, complete with lyrics and vocals. You keep refining your prompt until you are satisfied. That is how the songs on these albums were created. Possibly with some post-production editing.
It is still very temperamental, there is a mixture of luck and skill, but the best of the results are very impressive aside from a strong tendency to flatten genres. I noticed that requests for jazz tend to fall back on a midcentury safe sound not dissimilar to these new Christmas tunes and I had trouble breaking it from that generic jazz sound. From “Pop Punk” to “Death Metal” there seems to be a narrow range from the genre that the AI uses to be sure. Don’t expect that to last.
If there is a low hanging fruit for AI music it is Christmas songs, with over a hundred years of albums pulling the same old heart strings there is a lot for an AI to pick up on. I am more open than most to humans utilizing AI tools to create new music for themselves, or to study music. For example, an AI provided with hundreds of Turk Murphy sets at Earthquake McGoon’s might be able to create a set that would be passable to the most discerning fan. It might be able to give granular conversational insight about the sets unavailable to its interlocutor any other way. I am quite sure there will be AI Grateful Dead shows in the near future passed around like their bootlegs used to be. Improvisational genres are not limiting to AI; improv is essentially what all AI results are.
The technology to do anything you can think of with AI music is here, but the AIs specifically programmed to do something like a “lost” Turk Murphy set still need to be specialized. “Prompt Engineering” is a growing field for a reason, you still need to learn how to tell these things what to do, and getting it right is more art than science. There can be guides but no manuals. It takes, as the name of the producer of these albums implies, human curation to get it right. Someone still needs to have the idea and put the work in, there is just less of that work to do, and it costs almost nothing to do it.
When I first heard about Human Curated it was the vocal Christmas album, and there was one sample song going around with original lyrics that sounded vaguely like a sappy 1800s parlor song with a big band backing. They have also released an instrumental Christmas jazz album. I am guessing that second release was made because of the inadequacy of the AI voices on the vocal one. The vocal is better on some tracks than others but always sounds auto-tuned and off. Once you move beyond the novelty that it is an AI voice it just sounds like a robot. The AI lyrics wouldn’t make it off the floor on Tin Pan Alley either, though after years of reviewing Christmas music, I’ve heard worse.
The instrumental album is far more interesting and far more passable. The most interesting part is that, even though these are all new compositions, they are easily recognized as Christmas jazz even without any lyrics to remove all doubt. There are dozens of aural cues that the AI has harnessed to trigger that Christmas feeling. While a musician may wonder what the heck they did in post production the shoppers at Macy’s would never suspect it wasn’t a real band of humans playing real instruments, and shoppers would instantly know it was Christmas. For shopkeepers this is enough, and no more pesky royalty checks. That should send a shiver down your spine. I imagine the primary audience for this album is Spotify, where in the near future the algo will be feeding you AI music of all sorts without even telling you. And most people won’t care.
So, don’t buy these albums, go create your own AI Christmas album on SUNO if you feel so inclined. As a fun tool for exploring your own creativity I think AI is fine, the grandchild of a keyboard in a dorm room, electronic drum kit, or MIDI files. But monetizing simple AI creations in direct competition with human artists… call me a Luddite, wrench in hand.
If you want to gawk at the first AI Christmas music, you may find the albums streaming on all platforms. You can also listen on Bandcamp and ensure they don’t get a penny. If you find the vocal album amusing more than scary, test your reaction to the instrumental one. Winter is coming.
