Tool Tuesday: Create a Halloween (or Other) Story Song

Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are becoming more prevalent, powerful, and integrated in our daily lives. While this is on some level SPOOKY, given the tasks they can perform as well as the potential for abuse, they offer amazing opportunities to create with our students if used carefully. The creative power stems from the relatively recent dawn of “Generative” AI, which can compose materials in the form of text, images (previously discussed here and here) or even music, the topic of today’s post.

Who doesn’t love a Halloween song? And we all know that music can take the form of narrative. Today we will discuss an incredibly powerful and creative but easy to use webtool, Suno. Using Suno, you can enter a song description and genre and within seconds, it will generate a song for you with natural vocals. Let’s look at a simple prompt I gave to Suno: “write a children’s song about a pumpkin who comes to life.”

Check out the resulting song!

Not bad, right? You can sign into Suno with a Google, Apple or other account, and though the number of songs you can create is based on a credit system, it is available as a relatively free service, for now.

Let’s consider the kind of prompt you can give to Suno. It first of all helps to consider genre; I wrote children’s song but you can specify pop, rock, dance, or other (I had a student who wanted to create a Celtic song, and it obliged). What else can go in the description? Story elements! I kept this example minimal and related to a Character/Kick-Off, but using Story Grammar Marker^® to scaffold from your creators/students, you can certainly specify settings, feelings, and actions or conclusions. Note there is also a “Custom” switch where you can be more specific and write lyrics or lyric parts.

That said, without guidance the AI pretty much generated those narrative elements, and in a poetic fashion, amazingly. Note that the lyrics can be viewed on the right side or when you click through to view the full song page, providing a good literacy building opportunity. Let’s take a quick look at the story in the song:

 

I have yet to find a child or teen who is not on some level delighted by this tool. It’s certainly fun, but also allows key storytelling features that can allow you to scaffold skills that can be used in other areas. Though this is a Halloween post, I hope you will consider Suno a tool you can use in many contexts to tell many stories!