AI Tool Demo: Making Music With Suno

Have you ever thought that a class assignment would be more engaging if music were involved? A new AI music-generation tool, Suno, lets users turn their original writing into a fully realized song in under a minute—complete with vocals and an instrumental backing in a genre of their choice—and there are lots of applications for the classroom. 

Across various subject areas and grades, teachers are using Suno to help their students create catchy songs that can serve as mnemonic devices. In an elementary math classroom, for example, students can collectively write lyrics that name and briefly describe the various types of triangles. The teacher can then input these lyrics into Suno (the software is intended for users 13 and up) and have the AI rapidly create an entire song—in any genre—that the class can sing together as a way to commit the material to memory.

In English language arts, meanwhile, teachers are using Suno as a way to breathe life into writing assignments. If an exercise involves students writing poetry, for example, students can use Suno to turn their poems into songs at the end of the assignment. Besides making the activity more engaging, this exercise helps students deepen their understanding of mood and tone; prompting Suno to turn somber lyrics into a song in a disco or pop genre is likely to produce an awkward-sounding result, while blues might be a much better fit.

In this short demo, Edutopia’s assistant editor Daniel Leonard demonstrates how to access and use Suno to create songs, and offers more detail on some of the teacher-tested use cases for AI music generation in the classroom with the tool. For other fun and engaging ways that teachers are deploying AI in their lessons—from AI-powered chats with historical figures to tools that bring student artwork to life—read Leonard’s feature for Edutopia, “9 Tips for Using AI for Learning (and Fun!).”