Clockwork Galaxy by Mentufacturer

As a software developer I use AI assistance to help me all the time when writing code. Including for writing my music software.

However I've not been particularly interested in using genAI to make music directly. That's the fun part, why cut myself out of that?

But after hearing a couple of tracks a friend of mine made using AI, I was intrigued. How much of this fairly organic sounding jazz was the AI, I wondered?

So I had a bit of a play with Suno. And I was impressed.

Of course I didn't give it a generic text prompt and ask it to make the music in a vacuum. I gave it something of mine to make a cover / remix of.

And what surprised me, in a good way, was how much of the original example it picked up. It caught the melodies and rhythmic tropes pretty accurately. Sometimes even the textures.

It reinforced for me something that I already believed. That AI is going to be much more useful when it's "fine grained". I don't want AI to write music for me, but I'm happy if I could give it a MIDI melody in my DAW and say "play that on this kind of instrument in that kind of style". Most generative AI will work best when collaborating at a fine-granularity with the human.

What playing around with Suno demonstrated was that we are surprisingly close to it being viable to do that. In fact the AI can pick up a huge amount from an audio example. It is, genuinely, a bit freaky.

The other thing that impressed me about Suno was how it made variations and developments of the material I gave it. I have a tendency to err on the side of repetition. When I make something I like I sometimes find I can't escape the loop. Nothing I do to it feels better so I just repeat myself. But quite shockingly, having given Suno something of mine which, was frankly, too repetitive, it came back with some really good ideas for how to add variation. Ideas which either I wouldn't think of, or would be too lazy to try.

So what is this EP?

I've long wished I could remake my 2020 EP, "The Feelings Mixtape". (https://mentufacturer.bandcamp.com/album/the-feelings-mixtape) It was a particularly crude set of ideas from the late 2010s, and early COVID lockdown. The sketches are minimal, but have a certain bite to them. And I always believed that if only I had the skill, time and inclination, I could make a great dance set from remixing / reworking them. Or at least something that I would want to dance to.

Of course, I'm not likely to have time, energy or skill for that in any conceivable near future. (I still have a lot of material that hasn't had even one release yet). So I decided to see what the AI could do for me.

I gave Suno a 1 minute section of each of the tracks (Two sections for The Adventure of the Itinerant Ravers). And generated several covers in different genres. Having discovered it made a pretty good job of them, I tended to ask for some of my favourite genres: Balkan/Gypsy Beats, Brass, Electro Cumbia, Frevo, with extra nods to Big Band Jazz, Dixieland Swing, Gqom, Global Bass, Ska, Funk etc. I quite like the irony that the AI remake of my original harsh and crude electronic music, might actually feel more fluid and organic.

I kludged together the best bits of two or three of the AI's versions of each of the original tracks from The Feelings Mixtape, in the same order as the original. And then mixed them all together to make this Clockwork Galaxy Mix.

The whole thing starts with a hilarious "Mariachi" version of "How Does It Feel?".

Occasionally the AI would go off to produce weird glitches and tracts of noise. Possibly accentuating something it found in my originals. And I decided to leave some of this texture in the mix, to honour the AI's nature and break up the more stereotypical sound of it getting things right.

There are a tonne of issues and questions about using AI to make music. I'm still sifting through my thoughts on this.

One is that I'm glad I've been so focused on melody in recent years. Because melody provides a kind of identity which you can trace through the transformations and inventions that the AI makes. If I'd been focused on getting the perfect sound / production in recent years, I'd probably be a lot more upset by the AI wave. But now I'm fascinated by the idea of creating "seeds" or "DNA" of identity which can somehow survive manipulation and development and amplification by AI. This goes beyond music, but the idea of taking a motif or other "musical material" and developing it is already very natural "musicological thinking".

I'm not bothered by talk of the AI "stealing" from artists. I've been pretty much hostile to the notion of intellectual property and ideas having "owners" for my entire adult life. I'm a bit more concerned about what it means for the (non-financial) "value of art" that we can have so much of it on tap. I think art will survive this. Much as painting survived the invention of the camera. But it's going to be fascinating to watch how it has to evolve in response.

I'm also fascinated by concepts of cliché and genre. Many artists are frightened of them, hoping to find true originality. I don't believe much in individual originality. I think all art is evolved through a process of continuous copying and inspiration. That's what art and culture are. As such, I happily believe that individual expression and creativity involves a lot of pastiche and using clichés and tropes that are already out there.

Listening to this AI produced music, I know the AI is better at writing music than I am. BECAUSE it works in genres and cliches. And yet I think I've still given it the spark of originality through the tracks I fed it. Even as I recognise that my own melodies, the ideas which we can still hear threaded through this AI production, are themselves, incredibly clichéd, if not outright stolen.

Many people talk of "AI Slop". I firmly believe that we only have AI Slop because we already had "Human Slop". Such as the tens of thousands of new pieces of music uploaded to Spotify per day, all calibrated to be similar enough to existing music to fit into the same playlists. All art is about balancing familiarity and surprise. That's true in the individual piece and also in the large, across culture. AI ramps up our ability to make more of the same by orders of magnitude. How does our culture handle that? How do individual artists confront that problem?

It's not by thinking that we can or should avoid familiarity and cliché.

The cover image is DallE2's take on "Product photo of a Make Noise astrolabe and Buchla synth designed by Leonardo da Vinci".

Tracklist

1.	Clockwork Galaxy Mix	44:12

Credits

released October 14, 2025

Suno (suno.com) based on original source material by Mentufacturer

License

CC BY-SA 3.0. See the Creative Commons website for details.