Music Generation with udio Part C: A Tour Through Musical Genres
29. April 2024
The rabbit hole opened by udio leads to a vast labyrinth of musical genres. I have spent numerous hours on a semi-random tour, partly driven by music that I know and like, and partly by the many genre tags udio is familiar with. So, let’s get medias in res.
French Chansons
How about a chanson about one’s love of croissants? Nothing could be easier than that.
Prompt
L’amour pour un croissant, French chanson, style of Edith Piaf
Et voilà, we end up with three lovely chansons.
Croissant d’amour, Le Bonheur en Pate, and Amour Matinal are the results. Note that the last two songs share the lyrics and music for the first 1:06 minutes, and then they diverge.
German Industrial Rock
Currywurst und Pommes
Whereas our French neighbors are renowned for their culinary creations, we Germans can go wild over a good Schnitzel and, of course, Currywurst und Pommes (where the word “pommes”, short for “pommes frites” or French fries, is pronounced the German way). We also have the appropriate industrial rock bands like Rammstein to make udio celebrate this traditional “meal on the go”. There are also heated discussions among the true aficionados of this delicacy as to where it originated. The fascinating history of the Currywurst is described here (in German) and here (in English).
Prompt
Currywurst und Pommes, Deutsches Liebeslied, im Stil von Rammstein, rock, alternative rock
Liebe im Imbiss gets cut off at the end. The full version, which udio named “Herz und Wurst”, is 3:49 minutes long, and is obviously a live cut, based on the fan applause that udio generated at the very end as a nice touch. Here you can see that text was added to Strophe III (3rd stanza), followed by a fourth stanza.
Note that at the very end of the song, the last word “Band”, meaning “bond (between lovers)”, is pronounced incorrectly as the English word “band”. This glitch surprised me, since the entire German text, which was automatically generated, is pronounced correctly, except for this last word.
Cuban Jazz
I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan for many years (probably much too long), where I spent the first 4 years as an assistant professor of Computer & Communication Sciences at the University of Michigan. One of the very nice things I recall was the fact that I could listen to several university FM (UKW) stations that played nice music without any of the nerve-wracking advertisements. There was also the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) station from across the border in Windsor, Ontario, and the famous DiscDrive afternoon program hosted by the German born radio broadcaster Jurgen Gothe, who pronounced the German, French, Italian, Spanish, and English terms related to classical music correctly. He really knew his way around classical music and greatly broadened my horizons.
The radio station in neighboring Ypsilanti was 89.1 FM, WEMU from Eastern Michigan University. It played jazz of all varieties, including Cuban Jazz. Some of the broadcasters even managed to arrange for Cuban performers to give concerts in the US, which was no easy feat due to the US embargo of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. When I later vacationed in the Miami area, I spent a fair amount of time in the South Beach record stores and acquired a number of CDs like Buena Vista Social Club together with works by Rubén Gonzáles, a terrific Cuban jazz pianist.
Prompt
?Tráeme un habano!, Cuban Jazz, piano, salsa, style of Rubén Gonzáles
A longer version is Luna y Mar:
It shares the first six lines of the lyrics with “Ritmo de la Isla” and then wends its way into different territory. There is a very nice 30-second piano solo starting at 1:38.
Music in the Style of Enya
When Enya’s hit “Orinoco Flow” came out in late 1988, I was quite taken with her voice. Consequently, I have most of her CDs (now ripped on my very first iPad from 2010) and still like her style of music – especially when she sings in Gaelic, which I do not understand, but sounds mysterious like an Elfin language.
Udio clearly has ingested Enya’s music as part of its training data and produces quite nice compositions that are reminiscent of her style. Here is “Lunar Solitude à la Enya”, based on the prompt “classical, loneliness of the moon, style of Enya”.
Before I forget, let me mention that the tags shown below the song title (Instrumental, New age, Classical, Atmospheric) are clickable links. When you click one of them, udio will show you other audio tracks that make use of the tag. This opens the door to exploration of other people’s works that may be of interest to you.
领英推荐
Cumbia Sonidero
I stumbled across this fun Mexican music by accident while exploring tags in udio. In many ways, Cumbia Sonidera is derived from the cumbia forefather rhythms of the 70s, which included many tropical elements of Cumbia Colombiana.
The prompt does not even have a topic: “cumbia sonidera, tropical, lush, party”. The results are very enjoyable. The first song is called “Ritmo Sonidero - La Fiesta No Termina”.
The second version has the slightly different prompt “cumbia sonidera, guajira, danzón, guaguancó,”, as I selected several suggested tags. The resulting song goes by “Ritmo del Tambor” and is quite different in style from the first one. I later mixed in additional tags like Salsa and Cuban music to good effect.
Two further songs in similar style, this time mixed with Cuban jazz, are “Gira Sin Parar” and “El Son Montuno”. The prompt for the latter is actually quite detailed: “Qira sin Parar (Guajira), cumbia sonidera, danzón, guaguancó, guaracha, son cubano, son montuno, Instrumental, Latin, Regional music, Cuban music, Caribbean music, Guaguancó, Rumba cubana, Guajira, Guaracha, Cumbia sonidera”.
This music definitely gets you on the dance-floor.
Swedish Folk Music
On Friday a week ago, I had a “jam session” with some of my colleagues from Accenture, the company for whom I work as a part time external consultant. I introduced them to the wonders of udio, and one of the resulting “compositions” was a beautiful folk song by our Swedish colleague Katja Hellgren. Based on the simple prompt “motivation of a morning run, swedish folk music”, we now have “Morgonens Medalj”.
You may notice that the song contains additional lyrics, which unfortunately are not listed. This appears to have been a temporary defect in udio, which, as far as I can tell, has been fixed.
Schw?bisch (Swabian)
During the same jam session, my colleague Johannes Halkenh?u?er produced the initial fragment of a new version of “Schw?bische Eisenbahn”, with the custom lyrics borrowed from a well-known folk song. The prompt is “a schwabian folksong, folk, 19th century, folk, german”.
Note that udio does not handle letters with diacritical marks in the song title properly. It's easy to edit the title as long as you know what the correct letter(s) should be.
The rendition is completely different from the original song and is very pleasant. The pronunciation of the Swabian dialect is also quite good.
Piano Improvisations by Keith Jarrett
Let me conclude this article with several piano improvisations in the approximate style of the famous jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, who unfortunately is no longer able to play the piano due to two strokes. I remember hearing a piece from the “K?ln Concert” without having any idea of who the performer was nor what this was all about. According to one of the comments on YouTube,
“The story of this record goes like this: It was January 24, 1975, he had made a grueling journey from Zurich to Cologne, Germany, and was suffering from severe back pain. When he arrived at the place where he was supposed to perform in the evening, another unpleasant surprise awaited him: instead of the high-end concert piano he had requested, there was a completely different piano on the stage. Not only was the instrument smaller, but it was old, out of tune, and the pedal didn't work. In the end, it was possible to tune it, but it still sounded thin and tinny in the high notes, and a bit dull in the low ones. The piano was in such poor condition that the jazz musician seriously considered canceling the concert. In the end, he did come out in the evening. However, the limitation of the instrument forced him to think about his jazz improvisation differently than he was used to. He kept the melody simple, emphasizing rather the rhythm. And he deliberately played almost the entire concert only in the middle part of the keyboard - the keys on the top and bottom of it sounded terrible. As far as I know this is the most successful solo jazz album in history.”
I don’t know how many times I have listened to the entire recording, which is more than 70 minutes long – it is rather mesmerizing. Of course, I had to find out what udio knew about this style of playing. The results are not bad – they cannot compare to the original, but I find them interesting, nonetheless. And, let’s not forget that there will be udio version 2 and 3 and …
The entire exercise turned out much better than I had hoped. It involved several failed attempts before I realized that the prompt rewriting, in which udio engages by default, was adding too many tags that interfered with the actual style I wanted. I therefore switched to manual mode, which indeed produced the style I was looking for.
Prompting
One of the consequences of manual mode is that one cannot use the names of artists/composers since they would not be replaced by “equivalent” genre and mood tags and the prompt would be rejected. With some experimentation I arrived at several more or less complex prompts. Here is the prompt for version 18 below:
“Interstellar space vortex, solo, instrumental, Rhodes piano, live concert, atmospheric, lush, soothing, bittersweet, introspective, poetic, lonely, eclectic”
Here are 3 of the altogether 20 variants udio generated.
This is “version 9”.
Finally, “version 18”.
Outlook
I plan to round this series out with two more articles, one on generating classical and liturgical music, and one on creating non-music pieces such as monologs, dialogs, poetry readings, and field recordings.