Certainly, our tests Artists pushed Jen beyond the boundaries of what a “normal” person might ask for in a query, leaning more toward a “record salesman’s” level of familiarity with the recorded sound. Cleveland, for example, failed to get anything positive from a query for “mid-tempo California garage rock influenced by ’70s Indonesian pop,” while Heywood expressed dismay that Jen didn’t seem to acknowledge his request for “urban pop”, a type of Japanese music that rose to prominence in the mid-70s and has seen a slight resurgence in popularity in recent years. But for Heywood, this kind of varied music is necessary, especially as a musician.
“A lot of musicians or producers, when they ask questions, they base their ideas on bands or other artists, like, ‘Let’s do a Prince sound,’ or ‘Let’s add a little bit of clavinet like Stevie Wonder,’” Heywood says. Jen doesn’t have a good understanding of existing artists or even some of the more common genres and instruments, which makes it hard to really nail down a specific sound.
“I tried to get some warmth out of it, like a vinyl hiss or saturation or something lo-fi or vintage, but everything it produced had the same kind of hi-fi, video game menu screen sound,” Heywood says. “They even give you ‘lo-fi’ as a suggestion, but it doesn’t seem to have much impact. If you’re trying to get a particular sound, like ’80s funk, the closest you can get is something that’s more like Daft Punk.”
Every electric guitar sound generated by WIRED and the testers sounded almost too bright, and it was nearly impossible to get it to produce a song that wasn’t in a 4/4 time signature unless you used the word “waltz” in the prompt.
Jen co-founder Shara Senderoff says that’s to be expected. The tool is in alpha, and the 10- and 45-second tracks it generates are “meant to inspire and provide a starting point for creativity, not necessarily a final product,” she says. New features are coming, and because Jen was trained on a limited data set, it has room to grow and “will grow significantly in the beta,” Senderoff adds.
Everything Jen has done Under the guise of rock music, Heywood explains that the genre was akin to a “clip art version” of the genre. Cleveland managed to pull out songs that “looked like they could be used in a car commercial” or that “fell into Black Keys territory,” but she mostly felt that all of Jen’s musical suggestions were just plain cheesy.
“I felt like it was the kind of music I would make if I was having fun with my friends, joking about stereotypes of other genres,” she says. “Some of the songs I made could have been on a really bad Netflix dating show, but nothing I made felt like a threat to me personally.”
But what about all the people who make the songs you might hear on a Netflix dating show? Could Jen be a threat to their jobs? Blickle says she almost certainly is.
“If you’re a producer on a budget and you’re just trying to get your content out there, now you can say, ‘I’m not even going to pay a designer or an animator. I can just use an image generator,’” he says. “It’s the same thing with a music budget. If they can’t afford something that was going to cost them $2,000, that’s great, because someone’s going to think that’s $2,000 in their pocket.”
