Twenty Downloads, Sixty-Eight Songs, no Premier
A Note to Readers
The songs are generated, and I've done the listening. Getting all the files out of Suno will take a little longer. I'll be adding the new recordings here in batches as my download allowance resets, with new Open Doors work still getting first claim. Please check back around the end of each month or so for additions. The full set should be here hopefully by the end of the year. Hopefully. That is an estimate, supplied by the person whose modest experiment became sixty-eight recordings.
There is also a decent amount of profanity in this essay, which seems understandable given the size and complexity of the project. As I always say, if that bothers you, feel free to skip this one.
I Read the Terms of Service This One Time
This began with a notification that Suno was changing its Terms of Service.
An irresistible opening. Stay with me. There will eventually be a kazoo.
Almost nobody reads Terms of Service. Somewhere, presumably, there is a person who receives one of these notices and thinks, finally, something for tonight. Usually I belong to the much larger population that scrolls until the button becomes available and agrees to whatever arrangement now governs its continued existence.
This time I read them.
Not every word with a magnifying glass and a developing interest in arbitration. But, enough to understand that something I cared about was changing.
Suno had become part of Open Doors. I would write an essay, we would develop lyrics and a style description, and then I would ask a music model to turn this combination into something I could hear. Sometimes the result was a funny accompaniment. Sometimes it found an emotional emphasis I hadn't quite heard in the prose.
For anyone unfamiliar with the process, I put the lyrics into Suno along with directions for particular sections, then add a separate style description covering the inspiration, genre, and overall sound I want. You can get much more granular than that, but those are the basics.
Over time, those songs accumulated into a strange second archive: Christa, the kids, my health, work, books, marriage, mugs, and whatever other nonsense had temporarily acquired enough importance to need a chorus.
The range was not dignified. I am fond of it anyway.
Downloading a song had come to mean taking a little piece of that archive with me. Giving it a place alongside the writing. Having the file.
So, when Suno started explaining new rules about downloads, I found myself paying attention to a paragraph I would previously have treated as an obstacle between me and the accordion.
That paragraph is now helping determine how long it will take to get this entire musical project onto Open Doors.
The list I made before V6 arrived had forty-five entries. It eventually grew to sixty-two selected recordings, before this essay's own soundtrack. My plan allowed twenty downloads a month.
I would like to blame the paragraph entirely. Unfortunately, I kept records.
Twenty Exits
The new download regime began on September 3, 2026. Pro, my plan, came with twenty song downloads per month. Premier came with sixty, plus an unlimited-export route for work done through Suno Studio.
Free accounts created before September 3 received up to seven lifetime trial downloads for personal, noncommercial use. Newer free accounts were only promised occasional trials. Additional downloads could be purchased.
The unit was a distinct song. Downloading it again, or in another format, didn't spend another slot. Its stems counted with it.
Older music stayed in the library, playable and shareable, but age didn't exempt it from the new download rules. A song made before September 3 still counted if I went back to download it under the new system.
The monthly allowance replenished on the subscription schedule. Unused slots didn't roll over; purchased extras did. Annual billing still meant monthly allotments, which closed off one brief and appealing line of optimism.
I could continue generating far more songs than I could take out each month.
Abundance during creation, restraint at the exit. I could make twelve versions of a questionable idea. Choosing which got to leave now involved arithmetic.
The Download button had also acquired responsibilities beyond transferring a file. Under the revised terms, permitted paid-plan downloads were explicitly tied to commercial use, subject to the other restrictions. Clicking it had become part of the licensing arrangement.
Meanwhile, Suno was beginning to roll out provenance tools and announcing watermarking and fingerprinting systems intended to help identify its music elsewhere. Its explanation for download limits included making mass exports and streaming spam harder.
All this accompanied a growing set of industry agreements. Warner had settled and partnered with Suno. BMG's agreement covered both recordings and publishing, addressed past use, and established a framework for future participation and compensation for artists and songwriters who opted in.
Recordings and their underlying compositions involve different rights, and BMG's agreement reached across both. Another substantial rightsholder was joining what Suno described as its first model generation developed in partnership with the music industry.
It did not mean every argument had been resolved. At the outset, Universal and Sony were still litigating against Suno. Other artists and rightsholders had their own cases. There were also labor disputes about compensation when record companies licensed performances for AI uses.
I couldn't settle those questions here. I was trying to determine whether I could download another song about a cup.
But, that was the point: enormous record companies, copyright fights, AI training, streaming spam, the identification of synthetic audio, and my stupid songs about mugs had somehow all met at the same tiny button.
The comparison that kept my reaction in perspective was Udio. After its Universal deal, Udio disabled downloads entirely. Audio, video, stems: the exit had closed.
That would have fucking sucked.
Twenty exits were a restriction I could work with. Listening on a platform and having the song myself are different things, even when both involve pressing play.
And, twenty was actually enough for my normal Open Doors pace. I wasn't furious. I didn't feel compelled to deliver an emergency address to the nation from beside my headphones.
The rule was manageable.
I was about to make myself considerably less manageable.
Then There Was the New Model
The download changes arrived with another announcement: a new generation of Suno models was coming.
The promises included faster generation, higher fidelity, and more control. Suno described its early results as improvements across every metric it had measured.
My own measurement system was less comprehensive.
Can the new bastard finally understand that MALE VOCALS means MALE VOCALS?
There were other questions. But, that one had tenure.
The company also said all previous models would retire when the replacements arrived. The V4, V4.5, V5, and V5.5 lineage was headed out of the generation menu. Existing songs would remain playable and shareable. Covers, extensions, and other new work starting from them would run through the new models.
The recordings would stay. The instruments that produced them would change.
On September 9, the replacement arrived as the V6 family: three models with somewhat different intentions. V6 was the main model, aimed at precision, control, and finished music across a broad range of styles. V6-WILD leaned toward exploration, stranger choices, and less predictable interpretations. V6-MINI was the faster, lighter option available to everyone, including free users; V6 and WILD were for Pro and Premier subscribers.
I chose V6 itself for the regeneration experiment. That felt appropriate for a project largely concerned with whether a model would do what I asked. WILD could wait. At that stage, I was supplying enough wild on my own.
Generative models have personalities, in the practical sense that you learn their habits: what they notice, what they ignore, and which requests require the verbal equivalent of putting reflective tape around the stairs.
You also learn what they do beautifully without quite being told.
A model might misunderstand an instruction and still produce something I want to keep. A song might find a balance between sincerity and ridiculousness I can recognize without knowing how to demand it again.
Retiring a model retires possibilities people have learned to work with. A more capable replacement doesn't make everything the earlier model did interchangeable with what comes next.
So, I wanted to ask two questions.
Could the new model finally do things the old ones repeatedly failed to do?
And, could it revisit things the old ones already did beautifully without losing whatever made me love them?
The first question needed difficult instructions. The second needed songs I cared about. Both seemed reasonable.
Together, they became a problem with forty-five entries before V6 even launched. That was the starting count.
The Upsell That Did Not Work
Before the new model had even arrived, I was compiling songs for this experiment. A few obvious tests became several categories. Several categories became a list long enough that I had to start checking whether I'd counted things twice.
I had now reached the point where researching Suno's new download limits was threatening to make me hit Suno's new download limits.
There were forty-five planned distinct downloads, not forty-five attempts. God knows how many attempts might be involved. I meant forty-five selected new versions to take out of Suno.
The list didn't yet include McCarthy songs. It didn't include the songs for new Open Doors essays that would appear while I worked through it. It didn't even include a song for this essay.
That last omission was particularly amateurish. Obviously the essay about having too many songs needed a song.
Possibly two versions (it got six).
So, the direct project was already looking at forty-six or forty-seven downloads before ordinary life or Cormac McCarthy contributed anything.
Around this time, Suno offered me forty percent off an upgrade to Premier.
It was a genuinely decent offer. I still didn't need Premier for my normal use, and the fact that something was forty percent off had not created a need that hadn't existed five seconds earlier.
It had encountered a man who had created an entirely different problem for himself and was hoping he would confuse the two.
No, I did not upgrade. I have principles. They are stupid principles, but they are mine.
Later, I briefly reconsidered paying for extras. Forty-five songs meant twenty in one cycle, twenty in the next, and at least five in a third. Perhaps I could buy the final five.
Then additional-download pricing started surfacing in the several-dollars-per-song range, with differences between platforms, regions, and packs. Even using roughly three dollars each for the arithmetic, five extras meant about fifteen dollars.
Absolutely not.
Fifteen dollars was not going to ruin me. I just didn't want to pay it to accelerate a self-assigned retrospective about the restriction that made acceleration cost fifteen dollars.
Apparently there was a limit to my enthusiasm. We had found it, and it came in a download pack.
The practical rule became simple: new Open Doors work got what it needed first. The experiment got the remaining slots.
I wasn't going to postpone a new essay's song because an old song wanted to return wearing different pants.
Before September 3, I had at least downloaded the songs I knew I would need for upcoming pieces. A small act of foresight, tucked neatly inside the much larger act of assigning myself a forty-five-song research project.
This is how I maintain balance.
Can you Follow Ridiculous Directions?
The older versions are still attached to each linked essay if you want to hear what I was starting from.
The first group gave the new model difficult instructions. Some were complicated because the idea required it. Others were complicated because I'd been allowed to keep adding things.
“I Wanted Every Sound,” from The Genre Is Yes, Unfortunately, was probably the purest example. The request combined metallic hardcore, ska-punk, gospel-folk stomp, indie pop, bedroom pop, pop-punk, soul swing, cheerful pop-country, reggae horns, theatrical comedy, synthwave shimmer, and chamber-pop piano.
There were double-time drums, upstroke guitars, hardcore riffs, walking bass, horns, organ, handclaps, gang vocals, gospel responses, and occasional banjo. Sarcastic half-spoken passages needed to coexist with melodic hooks, punk shouting, screams, and large harmonies.
I had effectively asked a recording studio to fall down the stairs and land in time.
The old model had chosen which elements of this madness deserved its attention. The new one got the same assignment. “More control” apparently included controlling something that should perhaps never have been assembled.
The same essay supplied “Junk Drawer Hallelujah”: gospel with hyperpop. Comparatively restrained, until one style eats the other. I wanted both, and a gospel voice beyond the familiar singer Suno seemed inclined to send to every such occasion.
“The Pure Fiction of Manmade Climate Change,” attached to The Pure Fiction of Manmade Climate Shift, offered a different challenge: keeping an elaborate musical joke coherent.
The source essay was something I wrote in ninth grade, filled with terrible arguments and the confidence to present them anyway. For the subsequent change of mind, see How My Mind Changed, which was, interestingly enough, my first essay on Open Doors. It's years old and didn't get a new song for this project, but it belongs here as context. The polka is not an endorsement of my ninth-grade reasoning.
Comic polka and cabaret, a pompous male lead with an exaggerated German theatrical accent, kazoo, wheezing accordion, oompah tuba, toy piano, slide whistle, glockenspiel, and occasional duck-call or bicycle-horn stupidity.
There were beer-hall chants, smug spoken interruptions, dramatic pauses, and an increasingly operatic commitment to Vikings, breathing, liberal media, and sunscreen.
I wanted pomp, escalation, and enough structural integrity to survive the kazoo.
Can you Keep the Singers Straight?
Then there was “Missing Shoe,” from The Breakup That Worked Out.
Fast pop ska-punk. Double-time drums, guitar skanks, brass, a melodic punk chorus, an emotional bridge. A romantic duet about a college breakup, with enough humor to acknowledge that the people involved eventually married each other.
The instructions were not coy. Male vocal. Female vocal. Trade lines. Harmonize. Shout together.
I could label whole verses. I could explain who entered when. I could practically assign dressing rooms. Suno would still occasionally conclude that the man owned verse 3 now and the woman could find something else to do.
This is what I called generation roulette.
V5.5 eventually produced the structure I wanted. That matters. The model could do it. It simply required something like fifty fucking tries and a quantity of credits I would rather discuss collectively.
Could the new model do it when I asked?
This time, yes. The generation roulette largely disappeared. I could get where I wanted with a couple of tries instead of treating the Generate button like a slot machine that occasionally paid out in correctly assigned pronouns.
V6 almost always respected the male and female parts embedded in the lyrics. The old model's occasional ability had become something I could actually expect to use.
“Nocturnal Thesis-Chat,” from Princess Movies Are Objective, asked a related question across an entire song. Male verse, female verse, shared pre-chorus, both in the chorus, separate bridge parts, alternating breakdown, final chorus together. Generating two voices somewhere in a track was insufficient. They needed to remain themselves and respect the schedule.
“Two Years In,” from Angry, Grateful, and Still Walking, tested hierarchy: a male lead, with female vocals appearing selectively as layers and answers. The supporting vocals needed to remain supporting vocals without vanishing.
V6 left out the female background vocals. Maybe it would have managed them with more generations, but I didn't really care enough to hit Generate again. The song sounded good. The specific test was still a failure.
“It Wants the Heat,” from Synthesis, made the casting harder. As I remembered the intended arrangement, the interplay involved a male role and two distinct female roles. Could the model preserve three vocal identities rather than sorting everyone into two enormous bins marked MAN and WOMAN?
I was asking for a small cast. Suno sometimes seemed to prefer a demographic summary.
V6 didn't pass that one. The three distinct voices didn't hold together as intended. It was a genuinely difficult assignment, and I can recognize the improvement elsewhere without pretending this worked. Maybe V7. I have apparently begun preparing homework for a model that doesn't exist yet.
Can you Do it Right There?
“Everything Reckons With Your Weight,” from The Planet That Pulls on Worlds, tested a more localized kind of control. The moon names came with phonetic guidance, and at one or two particular moments, “PULL — RELEASE” was supposed to become shouted or screamed.
The whole song didn't need to turn aggressive. That event needed to happen there.
Following a broad mood is one thing. Directing a performance means specifying what happens at a particular point and having that instruction survive contact with the singer.
Jupiter had already supplied the gravitational complexity. I was trying to get the vocals to obey two words.
Across the harder songs, the shouts, barks, and screams worked really well. The harsh vocal direction was one of the project's clearest successes. Apparently I had finally found a productive reason to keep telling a computer to scream.
What Happens to Songs I Already Love?
The next group made the experiment considerably less scientific, which was appropriate given the qualifications of its director.
Some songs were here because I loved the people they were about. Others because I loved the generation itself. Often both were true.
“Her Yes Stayed Yes,” from Her Yes Keeps Saving Me, belonged for both reasons. My original plan selected that song, but I actually regenerated both tracks on the page: “Her Yes Stayed Yes” and “Her Yes Keeps Saving Me.” Christa mattered, the songs mattered, and there was no defect I needed to invent to justify hearing them again. There was, however, another download to count.
“She Has the Words,” from She Can Speak for Me, already carried personal weight. I wanted to hear what a different performance would do with it.
“His Sound,” from The Sound of My Son, followed for similarly indefensible research reasons: my son, a song I cared about, curiosity. I was not going to pretend I had selected it for its unusually representative percussion.
The Radical Lullabies Department
The three child-centered Radical Lullabies songs belonged together. Charlotte's “I'll Always Try,” from Radical Lullabies, began the set. I ended up keeping two new versions because I couldn't decide which I liked more. This was a lovely problem to have, and an unhelpful development for the count.
Those two versions did take a few more generations than most of the project. I had to rework the style description and the directions embedded in the lyrics to eliminate the childlike and female vocal elements. V6 was smart enough to pick up those cues. Unfortunately, I no longer wanted what they were telling it to do.
V5.5 had been plagued by the same problem. Ironically, the V5 version had worked in this particular respect because it was too dumb to follow those directions. Its failure to understand me had accidentally produced what I wanted.
The newer model required me to make the instructions match my intentions. An unreasonable burden to place on the person writing them.
For Rowan, there was “You're the Whole Song,” from The Record Learned to Move. For Wyatt, “Crumbs, Evidence, Toys,” from The Songs Came Back Wearing My Clothes. Three children, three songs, and three perfectly good reasons the list was no longer going to fit inside a modest experiment.
I'd also initially considered the Wyatt song another male/female test, then changed it to all-male because that felt more appropriate.
I would like this concession entered into the record before the next complaint about Suno.
“Somebody Has to Be Here,” from the essay of the same name, supplied that complaint. Its old problem belonged to V5, not V5.5. It had given me a version I liked while omitting an entire verse.
Not mispronouncing something. Not slightly rearranging a phrase. An entire verse, gone.
“Please sing all the fucking words” is, apparently, a legitimate model benchmark.
And, yes, V6 included the missing damn verse. To be fair, the V5.5 version had already restored it too; the original omission belonged to V5. V6 successfully continued the welcome tradition of singing all the words I'd supplied.
“I Won't Forget,” from Sticky Fingers on My Screen, Broadway in My Ears, already had a surprisingly effective childlike vocal element. Given the voice and aging material connected to that writing, a smoother performance wouldn't necessarily be the one I preferred.
A particular voice can become part of a song's meaning. The old sound has had time to attach itself to the feeling.
The oldest return was “Sweet Chaos,” an unpublished song I made for Christa during a Suno Valentine's Day promotion a few years ago, back in V3. Sweet chaos: precisely what everyone hopes to receive for Valentine's Day. Roses, chocolate, a manageable breakdown of household order.
The song mentions two girls. Wyatt wasn't missing from it; he was still a long way from even being thought of, let alone being born.
That detail made the old recording feel particularly specific. It belonged to the family as it existed then. Regenerating it didn't turn it into a song about our present household. The words still held an earlier version of us.
I decided to download both the original and the new version. Two recordings in the final set, though only one additional download beyond my original count, which had already included the planned remake. Even affection needed bookkeeping now.
I wanted to hear the song through a new instrument. I wasn't asking the old one to apologize for remembering our life correctly.
Christa Is Right Again, now in Several Genres
At some point, my writing developed a continuing record of Christa being right and me documenting the evidence against myself.
Naturally, it had music.
“Girl...,” from The Bureau of Things That Actually Happened, belonged because it helped establish the household-auditor mythology. Reality keeps confirming her account of events. I keep discovering that my objections were filed incorrectly. I wanted Weird Al’s upbeat and comedic styling plus his slight twang.
“The Great Bin Conspiracy,” from The Bins…, followed as the container-civilization sequel. Once the domestic record has developed recurring institutions and storage infrastructure, excluding the sequel would be careless scholarship.
The musical inspiration was the steampunk vaudeville style of Steam Powered Giraffe. Christa and I both love their song “Honeybee,” if anyone's interested. V6 handled the style pretty well, although my initial impression is that V5.5 did steampunk a little better. Not by much, and that impression could very well change if and when I ask for the genre more. So, not a failure, but not exactly a success either.
I regenerated it and also remastered one of the V5.5 versions because I liked that particular generation so much. These were two different reasons to return: hear a new performance, and revisit an existing favorite without making an entirely fresh performance the objective. Two selected versions, two downloads. The bins were multiplying in audio now.
The Christa Files supplied four more. “Not Just a Thread,” attached to “Love in the Time of Checkboxes,” carried the material that had previously existed as “The Lists Are Spreading.” It counted once. Folding an essay into a collection didn't require me to spend another download on the same song.
“Mommy's Being Silly” belonged as another entry in this ongoing household testimony. “Might Do Laundry” added Nelly-influenced rap with club energy, because apparently the domestic record needed something you could dance to. “Color Court Closing” completed this portion of the case against me.
I had turned “my wife was right” into a small musical catalog while still claiming to be the person exercising restraint.
The Premier discount remained unaccepted. Please acknowledge my discipline.
Rap Is Not One Enormous Bucket
“Might Do Laundry” also belonged conceptually with the rap tests, though it did not count twice. I was being excessive, not innumerate.
“Rap” covers too much ground to be one instruction. Rhythm, vocal pressure, arrangement, and production can make two songs feel almost unrelated while both belong within it.
“Wait: Think Choose,” from The Stall That Isn't Extra, used Kendrick-influenced rhythmic and production language. I wanted that particular intensity and movement to remain distinct from a default rap performance.
“Just Say It,” from The Apostrophe Hill I Chose to Die On, came from UK grime. It should not sound like the previous song had changed its shirt and practiced an accent.
“Cubicle Cell,” from The Essay Keeps Opening, drew on Dr. Dre's sound and production vocabulary, rather than trying to reproduce his lyrical writing. The comparison concerned the musical construction around the words.
Then “Might Do Laundry” supplied its Nelly-and-club branch. Four reference points, four different musical intentions, and a fairly direct question: could the model keep the distinctions alive?
I added a fifth: “3X,” from Normal Speed After Bedtime, with fast, Eminem-influenced styling. Given that the essay concerns the extremely fast audio I find perfectly comfortable, the musical choice felt appropriate. Apparently even my relaxation needed someone to get through the words at speed.
Every one of these rap tests passed beautifully. The differences remained audible. I wasn't getting one generic rap treatment with five sets of lyrics. The styles had their own movement and character, which was exactly what I wanted to find out.
Those artist names describe my reference points here. The useful material for the style descriptions was the musical character behind them. I wasn't asking for celebrity impersonators to perform my domestic and punctuation-related grievances.
Although, admittedly, that would have been an unusual benefit concert.
The Old Ones Were Already Good
The largest remaining group required the least defensible explanation. I liked these songs. I wanted more.
The hyperpop version of “The Essay Has a Soundtrack,” also from The Essay Keeps Opening, was my first attempt at generating hyperpop. The essay contained multiple genre treatments of the same lyrics, making music another way to turn the writing around and inspect it.
That collection also supplied another addition: “The Backlog Has Unionized,” attached to its fifth essay. It offered another light dubstep test, though “lighter” should not be confused with a request for something unobtrusive to play in a dentist's office.
“No One Asked,” the self-deprecating pop-punk song from I Never Watched Tiger King and That Doesn't Make Me Interesting, tested tone. Energetic and funny, yes. A novelty song elbowing the listener after every line, preferably no. Self-deprecation has a rhythm. It can become unbearable when the singer is too pleased with it.
“Nine Doors Down,” the Tom Waits-inspired song from Eight Writers at the Desk, asked for a crooked, theatrical, worn-in atmosphere. “Gravelly male singer” could be part of that, but it couldn't do the entire job. I wanted the room around the voice to have character too.
“What Frosty Says,” the Mariah-Carey-Christmas-style treatment of The Melting Point of Existential Dread, put huge, glossy holiday-pop energy around existential material. The mismatch mattered. I wanted the dread adequately decorated.
“A Cracked AM Halo,” from Broadcasting From a Cracked Dial, counted twice on purpose. The original idea leaned toward a Chris Stapleton-like styling; the version I ultimately kept had moved in a bluesier direction. I wanted to regenerate both branches: the initial intention and the musical turn I had actually liked enough to save.
Same basic song, two deliberate forks. An excellent illustration of how “just this one” becomes two when left unsupervised.
“Before It Had a Name,” the K-pop song from Understanding Pain, Part 1: Before It Had a Name, placed polished pop vocabulary against unlikely subject matter. I wanted that musical surface without losing the material's weight.
“Radical Uncertainty,” from Radical Uncertainty, Family Tables, and the Quiet Honesty of Not Pretending, was another gospel test. I liked the existing version. I also wanted to know whether Suno could find more individuality within gospel influence instead of seemingly sending the same damn vocalist to every family table, philosophical uncertainty, and junk-drawer hallelujah.
I have nothing against the imaginary man. He deserves a day off.
“Fake Ladders,” from The Ladder at the Edge, combined big band and hardcore. The test was coexistence. Both needed to remain recognizable. I didn't want the model to average them into something vaguely loud with an apologetic trumpet.
“I Had It Long Enough,” from Borrowed Mug, Borrowed Time, used a gypsy-punk, Gogol Bordello-ish aesthetic: frantic Eastern European punk theatricality for a mug that had acquired enough personal significance to warrant it. I already liked the track. Curiosity was the whole justification. The cup did not need remastering for legal reasons.
“Ale in Hand,” from Tastes, Not Titles, was my sea-shanty attempt. The old version sort of worked. It didn't quite sound like something a bunch of pirates might actually sing on a ship. The new test involved that imagined physical quality: shared breath, collective rhythm, voices that seemed to have a reason to be doing this together.
V6 still didn't quite get it. Admittedly, I am not an eighteenth-century pirate, so the authority of my judgment has limits. Maybe the problem is that I don't know enough people with scurvy. Still, the result didn't quite match the sound I had in mind.
“A New Fiefdom,” from Quiet Luxuries, returned to pop-punk with a different emotional task. I already loved it. The sincerity and weight needed to survive, without drifting into adolescent melodrama or sounding delighted to be on the way to a skate park.
“It Wasn't Family,” from Life Interrupted by an Office, added pop-punk with more teeth. Its relationship to office life needed some bite. All the pop-punk tests did quite well, across the self-deprecation, affection, seriousness, and sharper edges. It turned out to be one of the most consistently satisfying parts of the project.
“Haunted Hinge System,” from The Chair Has Entered Its Squeaky Era, supplied the heavy dubstep and bass test. The second dubstep test, sort of, after the lighter approach in “The Backlog Has Unionized.” I wanted to hear whether greater control reached the low end: how bass moved and behaved, rather than the model merely recognizing that this was the part where something large should go wub.
I also added “The Last Campfire,” the instrumental for The Wooden Cage. It was the second Where They Wander song in the experiment, after “It Wants the Heat.” The aim was almost a field recording, with wind blowing through the audio. V5.5 had simply skipped the wind, so this gave the new model another specific instruction to answer for. Apparently even moving air needed supervision.
Finally, “Over and Over,” from My Favorite Genre Is “Yes”, was another favorite and another male/female direction test. Affection and irritation had once again agreed to share an entry.
The categories overlapped. A song could test a production choice and matter personally. I was going back through things I'd made and discovering how many I wanted to hear again.
The Petty Office Remains Open
All four songs from Petty Office went on the list.
“Tiny Wars” earned its return as part of the complete set. “How Convenient” belonged beside it. “This Is Not a Question” also needed another outing. I liked the collection enough to want the whole ridiculous office reopened under new musical management.
The priority, though, was “Two-by-Two Reinforcement.” Extremely white, profane, deliberately repetitive, and structured around a two-by-two comic pattern. It was also extremely fun.
Here, the repetition was doing something. The rigid framework and escalation were the point. A model that helpfully varied everything, softened the language, or developed concerns about taste could make a more respectable song and ruin the one I wanted.
Please don't improve this into something I could play during an actual staff meeting.
I had standards. Several of them were inappropriate.
Some of the Songs Were Harder to Hear Again
Most of this was fun. A great deal of it was ridiculous. A few returns were also sad in a way that had nothing to do with whether the model was doing a good job.
“Black Wire Hum,” from The Pit Learns My Name, was one of those. I had selected it partly to test oppressive atmosphere and scream-heavy vocals. That description was accurate. It was also a very efficient way of temporarily forgetting that the atmosphere came from my life.
The song and the essay are dark and heavy as hell. Regenerating the song meant hearing that material again, with renewed attention, while deciding which performance carried it. At some point, “does this preserve the tone?” becomes a fairly intimate question when the tone is your own pain.
I also added “A Low Ceiling,” from The Pit, With Running Water. That page already had two older versions because I'd previously regenerated the original to correct a lyric. The earlier duplication belonged to that correction; this experiment added another version. One new entry here, not two simply because two players already existed on the page.
Together, those returns made the disability material come through forcefully. This was supposed to be a musical experiment. It was also a return to things I had needed to say when saying them was hard.
Then I added “Two Songs Before I Go,” from The Last Thing I Do. I loved that song, had put a lot of work into it originally, and wanted another version because of how heartfelt it was. The essay is about singing to Charlotte at bedtime when speaking is already difficult and the day has taken most of what my body has to give.
Disability was there too. But, love had more of the foreground.
Those songs didn't describe different lives. They belonged to the same one. The hard part, the exhaustion, the tenderness, the absurdity of loving your family completely while still finding the ordinary maintenance of being alive so difficult.
A better music model didn't resolve any of that. It gave me another way to hear it.
Sometimes that was delightful. Sometimes it hurt a little. Neither response felt like a reason I shouldn't have done it.
Then McCarthy Came Along
The McCarthy portion began with the idea that I might choose a few favorites.
I loved all of them.
At that point, what the hell. Why not.
The McCarthy collection contributed seven song entries, including the note about the project itself. I wasn't about to discover restraint specifically at the intersection of books and music.
“Old Black Spines,” from In the Shadow of McCarthy, belonged as the musical beginning of the return. It accompanied the reason I wanted to listen through his work again at all.
“Red Branch Pit,” from The Orchard Keeper Keeps the Rot, took me back to the first novel, its overgrowth, buried history, and extraordinary early language. I wanted to revisit the song's place at the beginning of that sequence.
“Don't Name Ash,” from What Cannot Be Named, belonged to the colder nightmare of Outer Dark. “Pocket Rust,” from Buried With the Name of Man, followed Child of God into a different arrangement of darkness, grotesquerie, and humanity. I loved each song. That remained a sufficient explanation.
“A Short Interlude,” from Why Read These McCarthy Essays?, gave the set one of its pauses: the question of why this reading matters beyond the books themselves. It was also an instrumental test: jazzy lobby music with a little Muzak in the sound. Apparently even my McCarthy project needed a waiting room.
“Knoxville on Our Knees,” from What the Living Carry, brought in Suttree. The writing's mixture of sorrow, comedy, and affection had already developed a musical companion I cared about. Of course I wanted to hear it again.
The seventh entry was “Not a Book Report,” from Not Book Reports. This newer piece already belonged to the V6 era, so it wasn't another example of an old model being replaced. It belonged in the expanded set because the project kept growing while I was revisiting it. Even the explanation of what I was doing had acquired a song.
The series about learning to pay attention had become part of another project about listening carefully. That connection pleased me. The additional arithmetic did not.
Forty-Five Was an Earlier Draft of the Problem
The original list really did contain forty-five planned downloads. That number was accurate before the new model arrived. It simply failed to remain accurate in the presence of me.
The extra “Her Yes” song added one. Keeping a second Charlotte version added one. The Bins remaster added one. Downloading the original “Sweet Chaos,” alongside the remake already counted, added one more.
Then came five additional songs: “A Low Ceiling,” “The Backlog Has Unionized,” “3X,” “It Wasn't Family,” and “Two Songs Before I Go.” That brought the count to fifty-four.
The seven McCarthy entries brought it to sixty-one. “The Last Campfire,” from The Wooden Cage, added one more, bringing the experiment to sixty-two.
That total included the old V3 recording and the Bins remaster, so calling all sixty-two “new regenerations” would be inaccurate. They were sixty-two selected recordings to take out of the platform. Alternate versions counted separately. A second download of the same recording in another format did not.
The two intentional Cracked Dial branches were already inside the original forty-five. “Might Do Laundry” still counted once despite appearing in two categories. The old lists material still counted once. I had checked. I was being unreasonable with considerable administrative care.
With the six versions of this essay's song, the direct project now comes to sixty-eight recordings.
At twenty downloads per monthly allowance, sixty-two had already crossed into a fourth cycle before this essay's soundtrack or any other new Open Doors work needed a slot.
The Limit Became Part of the Essay
Generating the songs and getting them all downloaded have turned out to be different kinds of completion.
I've finished the generations. I can listen to the new versions on Suno, compare them, and have an opinion. The download queue still has to share its monthly allowance with new work.
Open Doors keeps existing. Inconveniently, I keep writing. Those new essays get first claim. The retrospective has to wait its turn behind the actual present.
This is why the project will take months to download even though the music didn't require months to generate. There is no grand technical obstacle. There is a subscription allowance, a list that grew by seventeen recordings before its own soundtrack, and a man refusing a perfectly serviceable upsell on the grounds that he doesn't normally behave like this.
I normally behave close enough to this that the defense deserves scrutiny.
The model had improved its efficiency. I had improved the scale of my questionable decisions.
The limit began as a subject for the essay. Now it shapes which songs wait and how long the full collection will take to appear, however little literary intention went into the monthly reset date.
I don't think Suno set out to help me construct a long essay about patience, abundance, and domestic ska-punk. Nevertheless, here we are.
Better, According to Whom?
There is a larger change here, although I don't want to burden the kazoo with explaining all of generative media.
The earlier experience had felt loose and almost absurdly abundant. Try something. Try it differently. Make an unreasonable genre request. Keep the good accident. Download what you wanted.
The emerging arrangement was more licensed, traceable, controlled, and negotiated with industries that already had substantial interests in what music was and where it went.
Some of that structure could be valuable. Artists and songwriters participating by choice and being compensated matters. Dealing with people using mass-generated music to clog other systems matters too. None of that automatically answers what the resulting instrument feels like to use.
My own experiment couldn't isolate what licensed training contributed, or attribute a particular improvement to one agreement. I could hear the resulting model. I could test the things I cared about. That was a smaller claim, but a useful one.
End Note: After Listening
If I had to give this experience a grade, I'd put it around ninety-two or ninety-three percent.
This is not a measured success rate. I did not award fractions of a point for horn accuracy and submit the results to an independent panel. It is my fairly enthusiastic assessment after working through a ridiculous amount of material.
V6 was also much better at following instructions for changes in tempo or key.
V6 didn't follow every style description perfectly, but it did a pretty good job with some profoundly unreasonable requests. More importantly, I could usually get the performance I wanted without exhausting myself on repeated attempts. The Charlotte songs were a useful exception: sometimes better instruction-following meant I had to write better instructions.
That made it a better instrument for me. It didn't make the older recordings disposable. They were songs I'd already lived with, and I still loved them. I could enjoy the new performances without holding an audition to decide which version of my affection deserved to survive.
I already had a rudimentary grasp of music theory, but this project gave me a reason to learn more: what stems are, when tempo and key changes matter, how time signatures work, and a great deal of terminology I had only partly understood or never needed to use. It also gave me a better sense of how those choices affect what I hear. All of that should help me write better instructions, which seems a reasonable thing to learn during an experiment largely devoted to complaining about whether my instructions were followed.
More importantly, I came away with an even greater appreciation for what musicians and producers do. I played a little violin and piano when I was little, viola for a few years, and took a few guitar classes and lessons in high school. I've always listened to a huge variety of music. None of that puts me anywhere near being a peer of the people who can play, arrange, record, and produce it. Learning more about the decisions involved made me more aware of how much knowledge and practice sits behind the sounds I've spent my life enjoying.
For the regeneration project, V6 itself was a good choice. I had plenty to hear without asking the model to become less predictable on purpose.
I began by reading Terms of Service. I ended up listening back through my marriage, my children, my disability, my working life, my reading, and an alarming quantity of musical nonsense. Some of it was harder to revisit than I'd expected. Most of it was a great deal of fun.
No, I did not upgrade.
And, below are the six versions of “Stupid Principles” I downloaded for this essay, all made with V6-WILD because it just felt appropriate for this piece.
I could have made more. I had to stop somewhere.
I read the terms. My mug began to sing.
The bins performed a polka on a chair.
A brass kazoo proclaimed itself the king
And taxed the forks for breathing public air.
The gate allowed just twenty songs a moon.
I sent a screaming shanty to the door.
It bribed the guard with half a bent bassoon;
The guard said, “Lovely. Come next month for more.”
I wrote one song to mourn this grim delay,
Then saved six takes with calm, majestic grace.
My budget packed its bags and moved away;
The bins installed a nightclub in its place.
My heirs can fetch the files some distant year;
I'll freeze in Hell before I buy Premier.
