HN Explorer

Why is music so much easier for AI than code?

1 points by htlemur_bobby ↗ HN
Guys I made this song on Suno ai and it is literally, to me, more beautiful than any song I have ever heard in my life, ever.

But I still feel that I am a better coder than even the best models. (As of gpt 5.4)

It seems that music is so hard, why is it ai has already surpassed us there but not in code? Seems that code is easier.

https://suno.com/s/ZpeRr0nngDrlef5D

12 comments

[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 17.9 ms ] thread
measurablefunc
I recommend you look into Gell-Mann amnesia.
ben_w
Or Dunning Kruger.

I like messing around with Suno, but I know I don't have much musical taste, yet even so when I try to push it to be even a little weird it fails utterly: a call for "one minute" of animal noises is rendered as 90 seconds of electric guitar; asking for every verse to be in a different accent from around the world is rendered as *at best* two, but usually one; asking for one specific British regional accent often comes up American, and when it actuall is British it's one of two specific accents that's either "posh person trying to be middle class" or "posh person trying to be working class".

Gooblebrai
> It seems that music is so hard, why is it ai has already surpassed us there but not in code? Seems that code is easier.

I note by this that you don't seem to have experience in music? Because in that case, you are not equipped to judge the quality of the song at some levels beyond a listen.

The same way that someone not technical can't judge the code output of the LLM and will just be impressed by the functional output (i.e. is the site working)

gangstaai
Not certain but being a programmer and a musician i can guess. Theres certain trends about a pop song, tempo, drama, layering, effects, they can mimic hits, use predictable verse/chorus/verse/chorus/tag, etc. I think AI is great at code as well, completely runs circles around me in many domains.
speedgoose
Popular music follows well known recipes.

Pick a scale and a tuning, a rythme signature, some chords and a progression , some random melodic pattern, a set of instruments that fit the target genre, and it will sound okay.

Now, it’s much harder to make original and musically interesting music.

hash0
Seems to me that both music and language fall into the same category of "patterns whose consumption will trigger a highly subjective experience (pleasurable or repulsive)". AIs as pattern matching machines can do this pretty well by now. Coding, however, is a separate category, one where cold, hard logic reigns supreme. Code is not consumed to illicit a subjective response but to work, fullfil its job - which might explain the gap between these two.
Rochus
Sounds like English film and television series music from the seventies (e.g. "All Creatures Great and Small"). It's nice and surprising (in that Suno was able to create it). But not "more beautiful than any song I have ever heard in my life, ever" ;-)
al_borland
> more beautiful than any song I have ever heard in my life, ever.

There is no way this is an honest statement, unless this is the first song you've ever heard. I can only assume you're a bot from the marketing department at Suno.

airtisan
Judgment and taste. I’ll still repeat those words. As a musician and music critic, you’ll spot the flaws in AI.