I made 3 songs with Gemini’s Lyria music AI — one was shockingly good

lyria 3 — (Image credit: Google DeepMind)

Without music, I’d have a permanent hole in my soul that wouldn’t be filled by anything else.

Not a day goes by that I don't have a pair of headphones in, or the volume turned up to an obnoxiously high level. There are so many genres I enjoy — hip-hop, R&B, house, metal, electronic dance music, etc. And I’m always on the lookout for something new once the clock strikes midnight on Friday and iTunes debuts a wide swath of albums to sit down with all weekend long. I’ve always had a passing interest in producing my own music, but I quickly realized I wasn’t cut out for it when I cooked up atrocious beats on Fruity Loops.

I kicked off my career as a music producer by making a hip-hop track with a simple prompt

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I reside in New York (the borough of Queens, to be more exact).

And at the time of this writing, my city is getting assaulted by yet another snowstorm. It’s only right that I chose to air my grievances over the frigid, snowy weather with the assistance of Gemini’s music creator. I decided to put this fun prompt to good use to describe and craft an original hip-hop song that wouldn’t sound out of place in the 80s or 90s: “A grumbling hip-hop song bemoaning the snowstorm in New York City, with gritty boom-bap beats and a cold-distorted bassline.”

Now I have to be real with you all — the song Gemini made for me was… quite bad. While the beat was decent enough, the rapper’s flow and bars made me cringe since he sounded like a diehard Will Smith fan who showed up for an after-school talent show performance. “The whole city’s buried under snow!” is a fun crowd callout, at least. The song was so bad that it ended up being a comedic first attempt at seeing how my music-themed prompts turned out.

So far, I sadly haven’t produced a banger worth adding to anyone’s playlist.

Then I created a rock tune inspired by an image that highlighted one of my favorite memories

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Gemini’s Lyria 3 has a cool feature where you can upload an image, enter a prompt that mentions the attached picture, and create a track that offers a rousing description of what’s on display.

I went perusing through my Instagram page to find something that would be fitting for this next step in my AI music generator experiment, and happened upon a good one — a picture of me meeting wrestling legend Jake “The Snake” Roberts at New York Comic-Con 2021. To match the vibes of the WWE Hall of Famer, I put this prompt to work: “Create a celebratory rock song that describes the excitement that came with meeting Jake “The Snake” Roberts at New York Comic-Con.”

The final product Gemini produced wouldn’t sound out of place as someone’s actual theme song at a live wrestling show. And to be quite honest, I quite enjoyed this one more than I expected. I’m so used to listening to wrestling theme songs, which is why I took to this one so much after a few repeated listens. Are the lyrics a bit corny? Yeah, but the majority of songs that wrestlers walk out to have some cringy lyrics attached to them, and still sound good.

I’m pleasantly surprised by the result of this photo-inspired, AI-made rock song.

And finally, I got super descriptive by cooking up a house music song with detailed, structured prompts

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For my third and final foray into the world of AI-generated music, I got as descriptive as possible to come up with something catchy.

This time, I chose to delve into the electronic dance music genre and put Gemini to work with this super descriptive prompt: “An energetic, vivacious house music song evoking the party atmosphere of a massive music festival. The tempo is 120 to 130 beats per minute.”

With all that in mind, Gemini got to work constructing a song that would definitely get the crowd to come alive at an EDM festival. The track that emerged was a solid house music tune performed by a male and female duo that wasn’t half bad. While it did have a generic feel to it (I’ve heard a bunch of EMD songs like this one in clubs and during commercials advertising some new mood-enhancing pill), it still came across as a respectable effort from Gemini when it comes to cooking up a rave-worthy song.

Feel free to fist bump to this one in the comfort of your own home if you’re too embarrassed to play this in public.

Final thoughts

Gemini continues to add the sort of features that are fun for a creative like me to play around with.

Creating images is cool and all, but I get way more enjoyment out of getting in the digital music producer booth and seeing what the newly embedded Lyria app can make out of my custom prompts.

I cringed at the sound of my snow-hating hip-hop diss track, fell in love with my rock wrestling theme, and nodded my head as if I was partying at the Roxbury once my house music tune was finalized. Gemini’s incorporation of Lyria 3 is a cool new way to make music that may just be perfect for YouTubers looking for copyright-free music to use on their content and randoms who just want to test the AI’s music producer skills.

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Elton Jones is a longtime tech writer with a penchant for producing pieces about video games, mobile devices, headsets and now AI. Since 2011, he has applied his knowledge of those topics to compose in-depth articles for the likes of The Christian Post, Complex, TechRadar, Heavy, ONE37pm and more. Alongside his skillset as a writer and editor, Elton has also lent his talents to the world of podcasting and on-camera interviews.

Elton's curiosities take him to every corner of the web to see what's trending and what's soon to be across the ever evolving technology landscape. With a newfound appreciation for all things AI, Elton hopes to make the most complicated subjects in that area easily understandable for the uninformed and those in the know.

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