Melle Jutte, R&B artist and producer from Amsterdam, has always had a curious mind when it comes to new technologies. Together with Open Culture Tech, he dives into an experiment with the aim of composing four to five new songs, using a different AI tool for each song. So far, Melle has written three tracks, using three different methods. All these tracks are put into a live show by Melle to investigate how this new form of composing works in a live context.
His first experiment was with Suno, a popular AI tool that generates music. Melle had Suno generate a piece of music and then played it himself on his instruments. Although he put his own spin on this, it mainly felt as if he was imitating someone else's music. The process was technically impressive, but artistically less satisfying. It gave him a feeling of limited control, which hindered his creativity. Nevertheless, Melle continues to experiment with Suno to see whether he can ultimately achieve a satisfactory result by finding the right balance between the generated basis and his own instrumental influence.
Next he tried Magenta, an AI tool that generates single MIDI beats and melodies. Despite the interesting possibilities, Melle often found the result dry and random. The beats and melodies generated had little coherence and the lack of coherence meant he had to spend a lot of time adjusting and piecing together the generated music.
The third experiment took him to Udio, a tool similar to Suno. Instead of playing the generated music, Melle split the audio tracks and used the individual tracks as samples. This gave him the freedom to play and experiment with sounds in a way that he found very inspiring. Manipulating the samples gives him the opportunity to be truly creative, without feeling limited by the original structure of the music generated.
For the other experiments, Melle is curious about the potential of MIDI in a less random setting. He is considering playing with tools such as ChordChord, AIVA and MusicLang, and also wants to explore what he can achieve when writing lyrics using ChatGPT. He is especially curious how these tools can contribute to a more structured and coherent creative process, while still retaining the freedom to follow his own artistic vision.
Melle's research consciously focuses on the artistic potential of generative AI technology, where - unlike Eveline Ypma's Open Culture Tech project - he does not pay attention in advance to copyright and terms of use. Melle is aware of the risks and ethical dilemmas associated with the use of AI, but his focus is on freely exploring the artistic possibilities. Reflection on the complications of his creations only follows after the music has been created.