Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to produce educational songs

AI can enhance teaching and learning experience in the classroom

 

Music is a universal language. It goes beyond any borders, allowing people to connect to each other to establish different relationships.  Music has a pivotal role when learning a language as it has the capacity to produce different emotions from happiness to sadness and represents the culture of a country. Using songs in lessons is a powerful tool to aid students to learn vocabulary in context as well as to retrieve different words and phrases related to the topic that has been studied.

 

I often use traditional songs when teaching grammar and vocabulary. There are some lovely songs that can be used when teaching sophisticated grammar such as the subjunctive. However, famous singers and composers are not going to spend their time producing songs to describe for instance the parts of the house and their lyrics do not include the name of classroom stationary. They don’t do this simply because they are composers and singers and not teachers. Shakira in her last album talks about her relationship with football star Gerard Piqué and famous rapper Bad Bunny talks about his fears, frustrations and dreams. 

 

It seems like if teachers want to use songs in their lessons addressing a particular theme or including a set of specific vocabulary, they will have to produce them. This is the reason that last year I decided to start making songs to support teaching and learning in Spanish with my colleague, Gill Parker who is a musician, composer and a singer. 

 

I must admit that producing a song can be challenging, as it takes a good amount of time and effort making it. Once it is done, you have to produce the videoclip and create resources to be used in the classroom.

 

 

 

I have been exploring AI to produce songs for a while. I was looking forward to finding a platform that allowed amateur musicians like me to generate songs that have the Latin rhythms. Songs like those that I used to listen to when I was growing up in my native Colombia: cumbia, salsa, vallenato, paso doble, mariachi and why not say tango and flamenco among others.

 

AI has made a lot of progress in different disciplines. In the music field there are several platforms that allow you to produce songs. However, currently most of them are in English and only allow you to generate short songs, including two stanzas (10- or 12-seconds length). Although the quality of the music is good, being English platforms, when inputting the lyrics in Spanish the pronunciation is very anglicised and therefore not suitable to be used in the classroom. 

 

Like magic, two months ago I discovered a platform called Suno that virtually changed my life. While uploading a song for Linguamigos, I came across a video called “Create songs with AI for free and turn text into music.” I opened the link with curiosity, thinking that it was one of those videos with a catchy title but with disappointing content. To my surprise, the video in Spanish showed me, step by step how to generate a song with Latin rhythms.

 

It took me less than 5 minutes to create my first song about “los deportes” in the vallenato rhythm which is one of my favourites.  I could not believe it! I downloaded the audio and sent it to several music teachers in Colombia and in Spain. I wanted to know their opinion about the quality of the product. All of them agreed that it was high quality. My colleague, Mrs Parker, said that it sounded very happy and with her blessing, I created the videoclip, and it was published in Linguamigos, our educational YouTube channel.

 

The best thing about Suno is that you don’t need to know anything about tempo, chord, pitch, texture, harmony, key, beat, pitch or consonance, etc., in order to produce a song.

 

One week later, Joe Dale in his Facebook site Language Teaching with AI posted an article from Barefoot TEFL Teacher, talking about how to use AI to generate songs for learning languages using an AI tool called Suno, the same one that I have already been exploring and using.  Since then, I have used Suno a couple of times to generate educational songs for Linguamigos and have received positive feedback from different colleagues.

 Advantages of using AI to create songs

•  It gives you the opportunity to input the lyrics using the vocabulary and expressions that you are teaching.
•  You can generate as many versions as you can until you are happy with the final product.
• You can select the rhythm and the voice: male or female. In this way you can promote cultural capital by exposing students to different Hispanic rhythms.
• You can ask the program to generate the lyrics for you, if you wish.
• You can create a song in about 30 seconds, so it is extremely fast.
• Platforms have a free subscription and with this, you can generate different songs. With Suno you get 50 credits a day and with this you can create 10 songs of about 2 minutes long. If you want a more flexible plan you can switch to a monthly subscription (500 songs) or an annual subscription (2,000 songs) and you can then use the songs for commercial purposes.
• When downloading the song, you can choose between audio or video.  

 Issues that one can currently face when using AI to generate songs

•  You cannot control when the song starts or ends. At times there is some music before the “singer” starts singing the lyrics but other times it starts singing straight away.
• The music that is generated can be great, but the pronunciation of some words may not be clear. When creating a new version, the music generated is different so you cannot choose the previous one again.
• At times parts of the lyrics are randomly missing. This can be disappointing if you like the song as then you have to generate another version where all the words are included.
• The songs cannot be edited using the same platform.

Platforms that can be used to generate songs 

•  https://suno.com/

• https://www.voicemod.net/
• https://www.aiva.ai/
• https://app.songr.ai/
• https://huggingface.co/
• https://www.udio.com/
• https://soundful.com/
• https://moises.ai/

 

 

 How to use Suno to generate songs in Spanish

You need to Access https://suno.com/ to create an account.  Suno in their website provides detailed information regarding how to use the platform to generate music. Click here

 

You can use the song in the way that is generated, however, if you want to make the song shorter or longer, editing is needed to ensure that the lyrics and the music are well synchronised. I use Canva to edit the song and produce the videoclip. 

 

These are the songs I have created so far using Suno.

 

Song	Type of music	Link
Los deportes	Vallenato	Link
¿Qué has hecho en tu tiempo libre recientemente?	Salsa	Link
¿Cuál es tu opinión sobre los deportes?	Salsa	Link
¡Háblame de tus pasatiempos favoritos!	Norteña	Link
¿Cuál es tu color favorito?	Flamenco	Link

 

To conclude, UNESCO recognises that AI has the potential to address some of the biggest demands in education today, innovate teaching and learning practices, and accelerate progress towards promoting inclusive and equitable quality of education for everyone. Using AI to create music makes a great contribution towards this. It’s very interesting to see what can be done and makes composing songs accessible to everyone.