AI-Assisted Songwriting
Personal Album Project
You don’t have to be a musician to have something worth singing about.
The Personal Album Project is a creative exploration of AI-assisted songwriting through the creation of an original eight-track album. Over the course of eight song assignments, you’ll turn pieces of your life—your identity, memories, places, relationships, experiences, and ideas—into music.
We’ll use AI as a creative collaborator, but the stories, decisions, and direction come from you. Along the way, we’ll explore storytelling, lyric writing, musical direction, experimentation, revision, and curation while developing individual songs into a cohesive album.
By the end of the project, you’ll have more than a collection of AI-generated songs. You’ll have a personal album: eight intentionally selected and sequenced tracks that document something about who you are, where you’ve been, and what you have to say.
Tools
You don’t need a recording studio, musical training, or expensive equipment to complete the Personal Album Project. We’ll primarily use a combination of generative AI, AI music tools, and whatever you already have available for writing, recording, and organizing your ideas.
ChatGPT
We’ll use ChatGPT as a creative collaborator throughout the project to help brainstorm ideas, ask questions, organize stories and memories, develop lyrics, experiment with structure, refine prompts, and critique or revise our work. The goal isn’t to ask AI to simply “write me a song.” Instead, we’ll use conversation to uncover the details that make each song personal and decide how we want to translate those ideas into music.
Suno
Suno will be our primary AI music-generation tool. We’ll use it to transform lyrics and creative direction into finished musical interpretations while experimenting with genre, instrumentation, tempo, vocals, mood, and production style. Because generation involves experimentation, expect to create multiple versions of a song before deciding what belongs on your album.
Notes, Photos & Personal Archives
Some of our most important tools aren’t AI at all. Old photographs, journal entries, text messages, videos, calendars, family stories, voice memos, objects, and memories can all become source material. Part of this project is learning to recognize the creative material already hiding in your life.
Optional Creative Tools
Use whatever additional tools make sense for your album. You might use audio or video editing software, image-generation tools, photography, illustration, graphic-design software, or traditional art materials to develop album artwork, lyric videos, visualizers, promotional materials, or other extensions of the project. The specific software isn’t the point.
The tools help us make the music. You decide what the music has to say.
The Challenge
Create a personal album consisting of eight original tracks using AI-assisted songwriting tools.
Your album can tell the story of your life, capture a particular period of time, explore your identity, document meaningful experiences, celebrate people you love, investigate ideas that matter to you, or combine all of these approaches. You don’t need to know exactly what your album is about before you begin. Part of the project is discovering connections between the songs as you make them.
Each assignment will give you a different starting point for finding material and turning it into a song. You’ll experiment, generate multiple versions, revise what isn’t working, and decide which tracks ultimately belong together. By the end of the project, you’ll select and sequence eight finished songs into your Personal Album.
A Few Ground Rules
Make it personal. Start with your own memories, observations, experiences, relationships, interests, or ideas rather than asking AI to invent everything for you.
Be specific. Names, places, objects, strange little details, exact moments, and sensory memories are often what transform a generic song into your song.
Experiment. Generate alternatives. Change genres. Rewrite lyrics. Try something that sounds like a terrible idea. Some of the most interesting results may come from directions you didn’t originally intend.
Edit and curate. You don’t have to keep everything AI generates. Keep what works, change what doesn’t, and throw things away when necessary.
Save your process. Keep your notes, prompts, lyrics, alternate generations, and rejected ideas. They document the creative decisions behind the finished album.
Most importantly, don’t worry about making the album perfect from Track 01.
Make things first. Figure out what they mean together as you go.
Your Album at a Glance
The Personal Album Project is organized around eight creative songwriting assignments. Each assignment gives you a different way to find meaningful material in your own life and turn it into music.
Track 01 — Overture
Establish Your World
Create an opening track that introduces the mood, themes, or sonic world of your album.
Track 02 — Musical Self-Portrait
Introduce Yourself Through Song
Turn your personality, history, habits, contradictions, interests, and other personal details into a musical introduction.
Track 03 — A Place
Give a Place a Sound
Create a song inspired by a location that holds meaning for you. Explore its memories, atmosphere, sensory details, and emotional associations.
Track 04 — This Really Happened
Turn an Experience Into a Song
Choose something that actually happened and transform the details of the experience into a narrative song.
Track 05 — Someone Else
Tell Someone’s Story
Interview someone in your life and create a song inspired by their experiences, memories, or perspective.
Track 06 — Reinterpretation
Tell It Another Way
Return to an earlier idea and change something significant: the genre, narrator, mood, perspective, or musical approach.
Track 07 — The Experiment
Try Something Weird
Break one of the patterns you’ve developed. Combine unexpected genres, use unusual source material, experiment with sound, or pursue an idea you’re not entirely sure will work.
Track 08 — Finale
Complete the Album
Create the song your album needs to end. Consider what you want the listener to feel, understand, remember, or question when the final track finishes.
These assignments are starting points, not formulas. Your final songs don’t need to use these titles, and you may discover along the way that a song belongs somewhere different in your final track sequence.
The assignments give you eight reasons to create. The album you discover along the way is yours.
Before You Begin: Mine Your Life for Material
Before you start making songs, spend a little time collecting possible material. Don’t worry about deciding what belongs on your album yet. You’re simply creating a collection of people, places, memories, experiences, and ideas you might want to explore.
Make a list of anything that comes to mind:
People — family, friends, partners, teachers, strangers, people you’ve lost, people who changed you
Places — hometowns, houses, bedrooms, schools, workplaces, vacation spots, roads, cities, landscapes, places you miss
Moments — firsts, lasts, accidents, celebrations, arguments, adventures, ordinary days you somehow still remember
Objects — photographs, cars, clothing, toys, letters, furniture, heirlooms, things you’ve lost or kept for reasons you can’t quite explain
Sensory memories — particular sounds, smells, weather, foods, textures, colors, voices
Things about you — habits, quirks, contradictions, beliefs, fears, obsessions, jokes, dreams, accomplishments, failures
Stories you always tell — the stories your friends have heard a hundred times, family legends, ridiculous things that happened, moments that became part of how you understand yourself
Things you’re still figuring out — questions, conflicts, changes, hopes, unfinished stories
Don’t try to turn these into lyrics yet.
Write down the details while they’re still messy, specific, and yours. A sentence, photograph, voice memo, screenshot, old journal entry, or half-remembered story might eventually become the beginning of an entire song.
Keep an Album Notebook
Create one place to collect material throughout the project. This can be a physical notebook, digital document, notes app, folder, or whatever system you’ll actually use.
Add things whenever you encounter something that makes you think:
There might be a song in that.
You don’t need to know what your album is about yet.
Sometimes we decide what we want to say and then make the work.
Sometimes we make the work and discover what we’ve been trying to say.
Start the Personal Album Project
Each assignment has its own post with a creative brief, exercises, and guidance for working with ChatGPT and Suno. You don’t need to know what your finished album will become yet. We’ll figure that out as we create.
Assignment 01 — Overture
Establish Your World
Explore how genre, sound, mood, and musical direction can establish the world of your album.
[Begin Assignment 01 →]