Our tests are undoubtedly artists actually pushed Jen beyond what a “normal” person might ask in a query, leaning more toward a “record store clerk” level of familiarity with recorded sound. Cleveland, for example, got nowhere with a query for “midtempo California garage rock influenced by Indonesian pop from the 70s,” while Heywood expressed displeasure that Jen apparently failed to recognize his request for “urban pop,” a genre of Japanese music that rose to prominence in the mid-1970s and has seen a slight uptick in popularity in recent years. But for Heywood, such a variety of music is necessary, especially as music.
“A lot of musicians or producers, when they ask for something, they use bands and other artists as a reference point, like, ‘Let’s do something like Prince’s sound,’ or, ‘Let’s add a little clavinet like Stevie Wonder,’” Heywood explains. Given Jen’s lack of understanding of both existing recording artists and some fairly common genres and instruments, it’s hard to really land on anything specific.
“I tried to get some warmth out of it, like vinyl noise, saturation, or something lo-fi or vintage, but all it produced was the same kind of hi-fi, menu-screen-menu-video-game-sound,” Heywood says. “They even give ‘lo-fi’ as a quick suggestion, but that doesn’t seem to have much of an impact. If you’re trying to get a specific sound, like ’80s funk, the closest you can get is something that sounds more like Daft Punk.”
Every electric guitar note WIRED and our testers generated sounded almost too pure, and getting a song in anything other than 4/4 was virtually impossible unless the word “waltz” was used in the prompt.
As Jen’s co-founder, Shara Senderoff, says, some of that is predictable. The tool is in alpha, and the 10-second and 45-second tracks it generates “are meant to inspire and provide a starting point for creativity, not necessarily a final product,” she says. More possibilities are coming, and because Jen was trained on a limited dataset, she has room to grow and “will expand significantly in beta,” Senderoff adds.
Everything Jen did under the guise of rock music, Heywood says, it was sort of a “clip art version” of the genre. Cleveland was able to pull out a few songs that sounded “like they could be used in a car commercial” or that “were crossing into Black Keys territory,” but she says that mostly she felt that all of Jen’s musical suggestions were just cheesy.
“It felt like the kind of music I’d make if I was goofing around with my friends, making fun of other genres’ clichés,” she says. “Some of the songs I could have seen on a super bad Netflix dating show, but nothing I made felt like a threat to me personally.”
But what about anyone who makes songs you might hear on a Netflix dating show? Could Jen be a threat to their jobs? According to Blickle, almost certainly.
“If you’re a producer on a small budget and you’re just trying to get your content out, 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. “Same thing with a music budget. If they can pay nothing for something that’s going to cost them $2,000, that’s great, because someone’s going to think that’s $2,000 in their pocket.”