Today, I had my first jam session with Udio. With the introduction of audio prompting, I am now able to use my own sound as the starting point for a generated track. This seems like a leap forward, despite the actual product still being quite clunky. It’s a leap, because through introducing audio upload, Udio managed to merge casino creativity with the other, more traditional kind. Let me walk you through what I found.
As my first try, I fed Udio one of my old abandoned loops. As part of making music, I often arrive at dead ends: promising loops with which I can’t figure out what to do. I have a bunch.
Then, I extended this loop from both ends with Udio, producing a decent trance track in a matter of a few minutes. It’s not going to win any awards, but it’s definitely farther than I’ve been able to walk on my own.
Here’s the original loop that I made a while back:
Here’s the finished Udio track: https://www.udio.com/songs/usCmcABg3yP4aC1J8S5WCA
Extending existing audio clips fits well into the standard Udio process.
In the standard Udio process, we get 32 seconds of audio as a starting point, and then we iteratively extend this audio from either end to produce music that we like. Each iterative extension is an opportunity to make some choices – the casino creativity at its finest.
When uploading the audio prompt, the prompt becomes the first N seconds of the audio (the N depends on the length of the audio prompt we load).
Udio tries to match the prompt’s tempo and the style, expanding it, and in the process, riffing on it. It feels like extrusion: pushing more music through the template that I defined. As Udio expands the clip, it adds new details to what was in the original clip, trying to predict what might have been playing before or after that clip.
You can still hear the original loop in the finished track at 3:12. It is bookended by entirely new sound that now fits seamlessly around it. The music around it is something that Udio extruded, generating it using the original loop as a template.
The presence of the original loop hints at the connection between two kinds of creativity that I mentioned earlier. For instance, I could imagine myself sitting down with Ableton and building out a catchy loop, then shifting to Udio to help me imagine the track that would contain this loop. I could then go back to Ableton and use the results of our little jam session as inspiration.
As my next try, I did something slightly different. I gave a simple melody to Udio and then rolled the casino dice until I’ve gotten the right sound. At this point, Udio anchors on the audio prompt quite firmly, so if you give it a piano (like I did) and ask for a saxophone, it might take a few attempts to produce a rendition of the melody with a different instrument.
Here, I was looking to create something that sounds like a film score, so I was looking for strings. After a little while, Udio relented and gave me an extension that seemed right.
At that point, I trimmed the original clip from the Udio track. Now that Udio had learned my melody, I no longer needed the original material, since it didn’t fit with the vibe I was looking for. This removal of the original trick is something I expect to be pretty common. For instance, I could hum a melody or peck it single-note on my keyboard. My intuition is that Udio will (sooner or later) have a “remix” feature for audio prompts, where we can start with the sound of my whistling of a tune and then shape it directly, rather than waiting for the right extension to happen.
Once the right vibe was established, the rest of the process was quite entertaining. It was fun to watch Udio reimagine my original melody in minor for the “scary” part of the movie and boost it with drums and a full orchestra at the climax.
Here’s the original melody:
Here’s the finished track: https://www.udio.com/songs/eCMEFFSGnoicnHR4S5fRK1
In both cases, the process felt a lot more like a jam session than creative casino, because the final product included a distinct contribution from me. It wasn’t something that I just told Udio to do. I gave it raw material to riff on. And it did a pretty darned good job.