Monks Making AI Music
April 21, 2024Aum Namah Sivaya!
Something fun for the last day of our 5-day lunar phase.
And as they say, another day, another step forward in AI, and while for most of the world this technology is evolving too fast to keep track of (us not excluded), the monks at Kauai Aadheenam are still trying to keep up with the new developments—knowing that machine learning will play a common role in all of our futures. First chat bots, then photo generation (like the one of this robot composing music) and then video and music. All digital arenas seem to be an area that ai can reach into.
Our monks recently found this tool called Suno, which allows you to create instant songs about anything in any style. Currently anyone can log in with their google account and generate a handful of songs each day. It's undeniably fun to experiment with. We've been trying to get it to generate bhajans, but that doesn't seem to work too well yet. Still here are some just-for-fun examples we created. Most are generated with simple prompts such as "Folk song about the Monks of Kauai's Hindu Monastery" and after 12 seconds it gives you this, completely generated by ai:
Or how about "dramatic orchestral about the joy found in eating pineapples and dancing with Hippos" which gives you this (the last verse cuts off from a file size limit..):
For a change of style, here's a reggae song about our cat at the monastery named Bandit:
And here's an example of if you add your own lyrics. This one was done using a short poem (lyrics below), and Suno added the music and vocals.
Poem lyrics: A simple mind, a simple life. No agitation from joy, no elation from strife. No ripples to make a splash in this lake of calm, no need to be something great or to author a psalm. Just a life, like a bending blade of windy grass, glancing over all time like looking through glass. The floor is vibrations, the walls aren’t quite real, the ceilings barely there, for the open sky, I can feel. The infinite within the mind, glowing and bounding through all, a floating feeling, a mystic call. The air is pungent, but invisible to see, the trees are laughing, or is it me? The sparkles in leaf tips, the shadows gleam light, this world’s a wonder as my soul takes to flight. An endless horizon means you’re in a circle around a sphere, break free and you soon see that you find yourself here. Right where I am, it’s the same where you are. We have the same heartbeat and the same karmic scar. We’ve lived human lives, and danced through their fable. We’ve grown and changed as much as we’re able. Now we sit together in this space, this room made of light: I ask that you lower your ego and for you too, to take into flight. Join us all in your finale within, I’ll bring the love and joy, and you bring the din. We must have both shadow and light, to know the truths and final Real. We must have everything to be nothing, and that’s the deal.