OCTOBER
1 WEEK
OCTOBER
Helping Artists Write Lyrics During Idle Moments
TEam
[1]
Justin Kim
→
Piper YU
→
Amy la
→
Maya Partharsay
→
Skills
[2]
Rapid prototyping
→
Generative Ai
→
product thinking
→
User Research
→
The Problem
The finished product of an album is flawless.
But the process of making an album? Broken.
We realized there was a huge opportunity to inspire and support artists in the
music creation process leveraging AI that supports creation rather than substituting in.
To design for musicians - we need to think like musicians.
We interviewed and tested with over 15 working artists, musicians, and songwriters to ground our ideas in real workflows.
insight 01
Artists tend to store quick bursts of inspiration in disorganized apps.
When inspiration strikes, users emphasized how voice recording apps were helpful for quick access, but quickly became a pile of unlabeled and disorganized takes.
INsight 02
Artists Don’t Want “One-Prompt” AI.
Tools like Suno showed us that musicians were wary of AI that promised a whole song from a single prompt. For many, that felt like skipping the creative process entirely.
insight 03
Artists don’t ‘write’ lyrics—they punch-in.
Most artists we spoke to weren’t sitting down to ‘write lyrics.’ They looped a small section, and kept ‘punching-in’,
or freestyled new lines until something stuck.
“It’s more about finding a rhythm than the lyrics themselves.”
- Jace, singer/songwriter on “punching in” as a songwriting method.
THE SOLUTION
Generate temporary lyrics. Keep a permanent flow.
Instead of prompting for a full song, we leveraged AI to fill idle moments with malleable lyric ideas
that artists can punch in, test, and refine later to keep them in the flow of creating music.
Screen 01
User records lyrics over loop
Here the user holds to loop the song - meaning now this specific part of the song will repeat over and over.
The user can now sing, freestyle, or even mumble over the looped section of the song.
screen 02
User generates lyrics based off loop
Once a take is recorded, the app turns the loop into temporary generated lyric suggestions- allowing the artist to stay within the flow of creating music.
The user can view rhyming options and alternate lines based on AI suggestions, then tweak or record again using these as a starting point.
screen 03
User adjusts generative lyrics
Here the user can view rhyming options and alternate lines based on AI suggestions, then tweak or record again using these as a starting point.
If you're curious to learn more about the details of this project and where it landed, please reach out to Juk034@ucsd.edu for more :)
A Reflection
Designing in theory never works.
Although this project was put together in less than a week for a design competition in NYC, it reminded me that the best design method is to ship a v1 quickly instead of trying to perfect every detail on the first try.
