Eclipse Nkasi created an entire music album in three days with AI and thinks everyone else should too

To prove that AI could create compelling music on a budget, Eclipse Nkasi, created an AI music album in three days with less than $500.  Image source: Dall-E/Ngozi A few months ago, AI-generated images could easily be identified by the awkward drawing of human hands. At the time, we mocked AI’s inability to draw hands and questioned the claim that it could replace creatives. But AI-generated images have improved, and these days, it can be difficult to differentiate between images produced by AI and those created by human artists. The same is happening with music, as AI can now mimic the voices of popular artistes and sing in their styles.  Despite these advancements, many still doubt that AI can produce good music.  Independent artist and former promoter for Nigerian record label Chocolate City Music, Nkasi, tells TechCabal, “When it came to music, people were very sensitive or emotional about their stance with AI. People felt it wasn’t possible that AI could originally create art. You hear arguments like AI lacks soul or it is not possible to generate anything close enough. I took that as a challenge.”  Image source: Dall-E/Ngozi While AI music generators can produce impressive and unique sounds across various genres with generic or detailed prompts, there aren’t as many capable of generating impressive original songs. Models like Google’s MusicLM, which was opened to the public yesterday, can make interesting instrumentals. But these models stumble when it comes to lyrics. The lyrics written by MusicLM months ago were reportedly jumbled and incoherent, similar to how words can be scrambled on images generated by OpenAI’s image generator Dall-E. This version that was publicly released will not generate songs with the voice of someone singing, as that may attract copyright problems just like most of the songs featuring the voices and music of known artists have recently. Spotify recently took down thousands of AI-generated songs due to copyright concerns. Read also: What will happen now that AI can sing like your favourite Nigerian musician? Something original and more affordable Most of the popular AI-generated songs feature the AI-cloned voices of popular artists singing already existing songs, not new ones. Remember the AI-generated song featuring Drake that went viral in April? That was not an original. It was a rap acapella reworked with an AI-generated Drake voice. The new vocals were placed over an already-existing beat that had been modified. Nkasi wanted most if not every, creative element of the album to be originally created by AI, so he used different AI tools to work on each part—lyrics, instrumentals, and singing—and put them together.  Image source: Dall-E/Ngozi Not only did Nkasi want to prove that AI could create original and emotionally compelling music, he also wanted to show that AI could do it on a tight budget. This ambition was motivated by the former Chocolate City music promoter’s curiosity and his experience handling the music business as part of a label and as a solo artist. “Music is very expensive to create and promote, especially for new artists,” Nkasi told TechCabal.  According to him, a music album project generally costs ₦2 million ($4,339) to ₦3 million ($6,509) for an average artist. “You need to pay for beats and the average music producer in Lagos who knows what they are doing would charge you about a ₦100,000. Producers like Masterkraft charge well over a million naira. If you want to do this on a basic level, ₦100,000–₦200,000. If you are going to do 13 songs, you can do the math. Also, mixing and mastering can cost around ₦100,000.” But Nkasi wanted to create an album for less than $500 (₦231,000) in three days. The result of his efforts is an album titled Infinite Echoes, which he published on streaming platforms like Spotify and YoutubeMusic under his studio name, Eclipse Nkasi. “Apart from the overheads of generators and so on, it was insanely cheap. I don’t think I spent more than half of the $500 budget I had. The most money I spent on any one tool was the voice synthesis tool that allowed me to create an AI singer that  I christened Mya Blue. That cost me about $168 for the software and voice bank. Extra voice banks cost around $70,” Nkasi said. Read also: Google is set to change how you create and listen to music with its AI music generator Creating the album Save for some input from him, Nkasi insists that the entire creative process of producing the nine-track album was done with artificial intelligence. According to him, AI suggested the title, “Infinite Echoes.” It also conceptualized the album, created the album cover, wrote the songs, and created the tracklist, song versions, and instrumentals. AI also sang most of the songs. “I am well aware of what it takes to create an album on the artist and business sides, but I just wanted to get the album done in three days,” he told TechCabal in an interview. Image source: Dall-E/Ngozi Nkasi developed the album’s instrumentals on an AI music generator, SoundRaw. The generator has a bank of royalty-free instrumentals generated by AI. “You can tailor the length, tempo, composition, instruments, and genre of the sounds to suit your needs,” he said, adding that he has a paid account that costs $15 a month. He downloaded most of the instrumentals he needed in two days, and he had 28 days left to access many more instrumentals. “It is so cheap. If I was still a hustling artist, like in my early days, it would have helped me create multiple albums in a few days,” he said.  Aside from SoundRaw, Nkasi also used AI tools such as voice synthesizers, ChatGPT, and the image generator Midjourney AI for the album. ChatGPT wrote the lyrics and suggested prompts for other AI tools, such as the image generator Midjourney, which was used to create the cover of the album.  “I paid for a few other tools that I eventually didn’t use. Of all