At some point in the near future, we will write Beethoven’s 10th symphony. Many 10th symphonies, in fact.
On May 1, Suno launched v4.5, touting “genre mashups”, “enhanced voices”, and other pop-oriented improvements. It’s a very nice model, and I highly encourage anyone to play around with it. Prompting music generation is a new joy for the 21st century. What the Suno team didn’t mention, however, is that this release marks a small but significant milestone in the history of classical music. For the first time, anyone can click a button and generate something that sounds reasonably like what the great composers might have produced.
As a checkpoint on the road to Beethoven’s 10th—generated from about an hour of carefree fiddling and one plea to Gemini Deep Research for prompting help—I present whatever this is:
This is definitely not Beethoven’s 10th. It lacks structure. It’s raspy. But it’s undeniably close. You can hear the Coriolan, the contrast between first and second themes, the ostinato strings. Beethoven famously couldn’t write a good melody, so maybe this lands closer to Brahms than Beethoven in terms of melodic competency.
But even if we aimed for Beethoven and hit Brahms, it’s still a remarkable outcome. Compare Suno v4 using the same prompt:
The v4 sample is interesting, but it’s Fort Minor, not LvB. It hard not to mentally drawing an arrow of progress from v4 to v4.5 to the future v5. Already in v4.5 we have some key components of Beethoven: up to 8 minute track generation, some level of thematic coherency across multiple minutes, and creative contrasts. I can’t wait for v5.