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Indeed, our test The artists pushed Jen beyond the questions a “normal” person would ask, and into a “record store clerk” level of knowledge of recorded sound. For example, Cleveland got nowhere with the question “mid-tempo California garage rock with 70s Indonesian pop influences,” while Heywood said Jen “has a knack for creating music that’s fun and interesting.”City Pop“Jazz” is a type of Japanese music that first came to prominence in the mid-1970s and has seen a resurgence in popularity in recent years, but for Heywood, especially as a musician, such a wide range of music is essential.
“A lot of musicians and producers look to bands and other artists when asking each other to do things, like, ‘Let’s make it sound like Prince,’ or ‘Let’s add a clavinet like Stevie Wonder,'” explains Haywood. Jen’s lack of understanding of not only existing recording artists, but also some fairly common genres and instruments, makes it hard to land on anything concrete.
“We tried to get the hiss and saturation of vinyl, the warmth of a lo-fi, vintage sound, but it ended up sounding hi-fi and like a video game menu screen,” says Heywood. “‘Lo-fi’ was suggested pretty quickly, but didn’t really cut it. If you’re going for a specific sound, like ’80s funk,’ then something like Daft Punk is the closest we can get.”
The electric guitar sounds that WIRED and our testers generated were all so clean that it was virtually impossible to generate tracks in anything other than a 4/4 time signature, unless you included the word “waltz” in the prompt.
Some of this is to be expected, according to Jen co-founder Shara Senderoff: The tool is still in alpha, and the 10- and 45-second tracks it generates are “intended to inspire and provide a creative starting point, not necessarily the final product,” she said. New features are also coming, and because Jen was trained using a limited dataset, there’s room to grow, and “it will be significantly expanded in the beta phase,” Senderoff added.
Everything Jen made Disguised as rock music, the music was like a “clip art version” of the genre, says Haywood, and while Cleveland managed to pull off a few songs that “could be used in a car commercial” and “would be in Black Keys territory,” he felt that above all else, all of Jen’s musical suggestions were just cheesy.
“It felt like the kind of music I’d make while messing around with friends and joking about cliches in other genres,” she says, “and while I could imagine some of the songs being used on some awful Netflix dating show, the songs I made didn’t feel personally threatening.”
But what about the people who write the songs you hear on the Netflix dating show? Does Jen pose a threat to their jobs? According to Brickle, it’s almost a certainty.
“If you’re a low-budget producer and you just want to put out content, now you can say, ‘I’m not going to pay a designer or an animator. I’ll just use an image generator,'” he says. “The same goes for music budgets. If you can make something that costs $2,000 free, that’s great. Someone will think that’s $2,000 in their pocket.”