How To Create Your Own Christmas Music With AI — and Why You Should Just Stick With Human Artists

When it comes to holiday musicAll I Want for Christmas is You by Mariah Carey is a mood setter. It’s fun and upbeat, and it helps you accomplish all those holiday tasks, like cooking And gift wrapping. I’m definitely a fan of his holiday hit, but it’s the same song every year.

I live above a restaurant that plays Sinatra’s White Christmas on repeat. It’s a timeless song. Romantic and comfortable. A very different atmosphere.

While it’s comforting to listen to the same Christmas songs every year, it would be cool to create your own soundtrack with a song dedicated to each member of the family around the table? It is now possible with AI. Just like you can use it to create personalized wrapping paper, greeting cardsdesign your Christmas lunch table, create personalized coloring pages for kids And turn leftovers into recipes.

Given the result of the gift wrapping I made with AI, I used Adobe Firefly once again in an attempt to create my own timeless Christmas song. According to Adobe, Firefly Audio Model creates fully licensed, studio-quality instrumental tracks. It is only trained on content to which Adobe has rights.

Firefly launched in March 2023 and is available as part of Adobe’s membership tiers, starting at $10 per month. However, you can use Firefly for free with limited access.

Set up

If you don’t have an Adobe account, follow the setup process and then visit its soundtrack generation tool.

You can either upload a video and let Firefly suggest the perfect mood, style, or goal, or start from scratch by selecting from predefined tags.

Using the interface, you can also enter the energy, tempo and duration of your song.

Before you start playing with the music generator, you should pause to think about the type of song you are creating: where you will play it, who it is for, and what feeling you want to communicate.

Create your AI song

With most of our celebrations happening after Christmas Day, I wanted to try out Firefly to create a nice tune to play with my wife while we opened presents.

To start, I uploaded a video of a recent snow day we had, just to see what type of song would create from it.

This populated the brief, as well as the energy, tempo and duration. I selected “Peaceful” for ambiance, “Cinematic” for style, and added “Personal” for song. I wanted it to last longer than 11 seconds (which is what it was preset to), so I adjusted it to one minute, then pressed Generate.

This gave me four track options.

I loved them all, but song 1 was my favorite. But it wasn’t really Christmas. It was cinematic and could certainly be used as background music in an Instagram video, but not as much as an annual festive banger.

AI versus human musical artists

I returned to the original link to start again with custom prompts:

I changed the length of the song to 3 minutes, which increased the credits to 60.

This generated four tracks again, and the songs were okay. But they had nothing on Mariah. To test her “talent” once again, I entered these prompts: “A festive song in the style of Mariah Carey, for Christmas morning.”

But they were pretty generic and definitely didn’t put me in the Christmas spirit.

Even though they were all passable for background music, I would much rather put them on a Spotify Christmas playlist or open my window and listen to Sinatra. It would be cool to be able to say, “I made this song,” but that was it.

Better to stick to human artists.

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