What app turns lyrics into a song?
In recent years, a new category of music apps has emerged that can generate a song using just the lyrics. These “lyrics to song” apps work by taking lyrics inputted by the user and using artificial intelligence to create an accompanying melody and instrumental background. This capability opens up many creative possibilities, allowing anyone to turn their written words into a complete musical creation.
Some of the most popular apps that offer lyrics-to-song functionality include Musixmatch, Genius, Shazam, Quick Lyric, and Resso. These apps leverage powerful AI systems to analyze the lyrics and generate musical elements like rhythm, melody, and instruments that match the words. While the quality of the computer-generated music varies, the technology is rapidly improving to create results that sound more human and expressive.
History
The technology to convert text into sung lyrics emerged in the early 2000s. In 2001, researchers at AT&T Laboratories developed a speech synthesis system called ATTSinging that could convert text into sung vocals by extracting pitch contour information from existing recordings and applying it to new lyrics (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.melodis.midomiMusicIdentifier.freemium&hl=en_US&gl=US). This allowed for the creation of a sung vocal performance from text input.
Around the same time, Yamaha developed the Vocaloid singing voice synthesizer technology that allowed users to input lyrics and melody to create sung vocals. The first Vocaloid voice libraries were released in 2004 in Japan (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/soundhound-music-discovery/id355554941). This technology paved the way for text-to-song as it enabled users to create sung vocals from text input.
The mid to late 2000s saw the emergence of mobile apps that could identify songs by listening to music recordings. In 2008, SoundHound was launched, allowing users to discover music by recording a clip of a song. In 2009, Shazam launched a similar song identification service. This song recognition technology was a precursor to converting lyrics into full song creations (https://lab.songstats.com/how-shazam-went-from-an-sms-service-to-living-on-your-iphone-f2b842aff6e4).
By the early 2010s, apps emerged that combined these technologies to convert typed lyrics into complete song creations. Apps like Songify, Voloco, and Yokee began using text-to-speech and AI synthesis models to generate pop song creations from lyrics input by users. The accuracy and quality of these text-to-song creations has rapidly improved in recent years with advancements in AI synthesis models leading to the powerful text-to-song apps available today.
How The Apps Work
Lyrics-to-song apps use advanced speech synthesis technology to convert typed or pasted lyrics into vocal tracks with background music. The key components involved are:
Text analysis – The app scans the input lyrics to determine syllables, stress, rhythm, and other linguistic features that inform the synthesized singing.
Speech synthesis – Complex algorithms are used to generate the vocal tracks, adjusting pitch, tone, speed, vibrato and other variables to create natural sounding singing voices.
Audio processing – The vocal tracks are processed to smooth transitions, add reverb and other effects, and blend the vocals with automatically generated instrumental backgrounds.
The entire process from lyrics input to final audio output is handled automatically by the app’s AI systems. The quality of the singing voice and background music can be customized by selecting different styles, voices, instruments and genres.
Major Apps in the Market
There are several leading apps that can turn text into song using AI technology. Some of the most popular and capable options include:
Woven – Woven uses advanced AI to generate high-quality vocal tracks from text. It allows users to customize the voice, genre, mood, tempo, and more. Woven produces professional results but requires a paid subscription.
Murf – Murf is an AI tool that converts text to singing with a range of voices and musical styles to choose from. It offers a free tier but advanced features require a paid plan. Murf excels at mimicking human voices and flows.
Acapella – Acapella creates acapella vocal tracks from text input. It has over 50 vocal options and allows tweaking parameters like key, BPM, rhythm, and pitch. Acapella produces high-quality acapella singing but lacks instrumentation.
While these apps have limitations like paid tiers and lack of full musical control, they showcase the rapid advances in AI text-to-song conversion. Each app has strengths in certain areas like voice realism, customization and ease of use. The technology continues to improve, providing creative new opportunities for musicians and songwriters.
Customization
The apps provide various options to customize the musical style, instruments, tempo and other aspects of the generated songs. For example, SongBay allows you to choose from over 30 instruments and 20 genres to create a unique musical arrangement for your lyrics (YourSongmaker | Best Custom Song Maker | Your Lyrics). You can tweak parameters like melody, harmony, rhythm, and more. Apps like Lyrics Editor even let you edit the timing of the lyrics to sync perfectly with the music (Lyrics Editor: Make Lyrics – Apps on Google Play).
In addition to musical customization, some apps provide advanced editing features for the lyrics themselves. You can edit individual words or lines, revise the rhyme scheme, add punctuation, etc. to refine your lyrics before turning them into a complete song.
The level of customization varies across apps – free apps tend to have limited options while paid services provide more flexibility. But overall, these lyric-to-song apps aim to give users creative control to turn their lyrics into a personalized musical arrangement.
Use Cases
Lyrics apps that turn text into song have a wide variety of use cases. Here are some examples of how people are using these creative apps:
For fun and entertainment. Many people enjoy using lyrics apps to turn their favorite song lyrics or poems into sung creations. It’s a novel way to engage more deeply with the lyrics and hear them in a new way.
Education and learning. Teachers use lyrics apps in class to help students better understand concepts like rhyme schemes, rhythm, and poetic structure. Students can also use the apps to practice public speaking or presentation skills.
Songwriting and creativity. Aspiring songwriters use lyrics apps to hear their lyrics sung back to them, helping them refine and improve their songwriting craft. The apps aid in experimenting with melody and composition.
Language learning. For those learning a new language, lyrics apps enable them to input text in the new language and hear it sung back, helping reinforce proper pronunciation and intonation.
Accessibility. Individuals with visual impairments or reading disabilities may benefit from lyrics apps that read text aloud in a more melodic way.
Personal expression. Many enjoy using lyrics apps to turn their own poems, quotes, and personal texts into song. This provides a creative outlet for self-expression.
Overall, lyrics apps open up new possibilities to engage with language and lyrics in an audible, musical format. Their versatility enables creative applications across entertainment, education, self-expression, and accessibility needs.
Benefits
Text-to-song AI apps provide numerous advantages when it comes to easy music creation, learning music, and expanding creativity. Some of the key benefits include:
Easy and fast song creation – These apps allow anyone to instantly create a song simply by typing in lyrics, without needing musical skills or instruments. Songs can be generated in seconds rather than hours or days.[1]
Democratizing music production – Text-to-song apps open music creation to a much wider audience by eliminating barriers of musical knowledge, theory, instruments, and recording equipment.[2]
Sparking creativity – Having an instant way to turn lyrics into song can boost creativity and experimentation with different lyrical ideas.[3]
Music education – The apps provide a engaging way for aspiring musicians to learn about song structure, melody, and harmony by seeing their lyrics come to life.
Flexibility and customization – Many apps allow tweaking of genre, mood, instruments, tempo, and other parameters to craft a unique sound.
Overall, text-to-song apps make musical creation more accessible, inspire creativity, and open new possibilities for the democratization of music.
Limitations
While text-to-song AI apps have made impressive advances, they still have some key limitations compared to real human-generated music, as noted in sources like this TechCrunch article. Current AI systems are limited to generating only about 30 seconds of music and lyrics, which is far shorter than most pop songs. The musical quality is also not yet on par with professional human songwriting, with some awkward transitions and repetitive melodies. The lyrics, while coherent, lack the poetic nuance and emotional resonance of human songwriters. Furthermore, the musical style options are still quite limited compared to the diversity of genres and subgenres in human music. While AI text-to-song shows potential, it has yet to master the complexity, artistry, and ingenuity that allows the best human musicians to create timeless music that deeply moves listeners.
Future Outlook
Text-to-song AI technology is still in its early stages but is expected to improve dramatically in the coming years. One key area of development is enhancing the naturalness and emotional expressiveness of the generated vocals. Currently, most text-to-song apps use synthetic voices, but AI researchers are working on producing more human-like singing by training models on large datasets of real vocal performances.
According to a recent article by a16z, startups like Anthropic are developing AI systems that can generate vocals controllable by a variety of attributes like tone, expression, vibrato, and genre. This will allow users to have fine-grained control in sculpting the perfect vocal performance. Additionally, generative AI models are rapidly improving at mimicking specific singer’s voices, indicating customized vocals may be possible soon.
The instrumentation and production quality of AI-generated songs are also expected to improve. Models are being trained on songs with high technical production values to enable realistic instrumentation. Conditional AI music generation methods allow users to specify instruments, styles, tempo, and more. Over time, this could enable users without musical ability to produce radio-ready songs tailored to their lyrics and preferences.
As text-to-song models become more capable, innovative use cases are likely to emerge. For example, video game soundtracks could be procedurally generated from text describing in-game events. Ad agencies may dynamically create jingles matching a client’s brand text. Overall, generative text-to-song AI promises to further democratize music creation in the years ahead.
Conclusions
On the whole, lyric-to-song apps have come a long way in recent years. What started as a novelty has quickly evolved into a sophisticated tool for musicians, songwriters, and music lovers alike. The ability to instantly turn written words into a complete song opens up new creative possibilities and makes musical expression more accessible. While the technology still has room for improvement, particularly in accurately conveying subtle emotions and rhythms, lyric-to-song apps are only bound to get better over time.
Looking ahead, these apps are poised to become even more integrated into the music creation process. We may see lyric-to-song capabilities built directly into digital audio workstations, instruments, and other tools used by songwriters and producers. Seamless integration with streaming platforms could also allow users to not just create but share and monetize AI-generated songs with ease. However, as the technology advances, important ethical considerations around originality, copyright, and fair compensation for human creators will need to be addressed.
In closing, lyric-to-song apps represent an exciting new frontier in music tech. While an AI may never fully replicate the nuances of human creativity, these tools can save time, spark new ideas, and open the door to musical expression for more people. As lyric-to-song technology improves and becomes more accessible, it has the potential to fundamentally change how music is made and enjoyed around the world.
