A lot of times we focus on how AI tools can generate text, such as lesson plans, rubrics, assessments, leveled reading passages, and more. As awesome as those uses are, AI can create much more than text.
Recently AI has become more and more multi-modal, meaning that it is also able to understand and generate media in other forms such as images, audio, music, and video. Each of these deserves its own blog post (or several) but for this entry we are going to explore making a song with AI.
Specifically I decided to see if I could use AI tools to create an educational song that could be used to help teach a concept to students. The plan was to use ChatGPT to write the lyrics for the song, and then use Udio to generate the music and to sing the completed song.
For this test I used the water cycle as my topic, and I am so excited with the final product! See below to listen to the water cycle song, and for the directions and tools I used to create it. I hope this will inspire you to create a song, and I would love to hear what you make, as well as any suggestions you have for making this project better.
🎵 The Water Cycle Song (2 minutes)
Or watch on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hyS5sFl6-Ew
✍️ Writing the Lyrics
For this particular song I used ChatGPT version 4o - https://chatgpt.com/ - to write the lyrics. For the prompt I simply asked:
| Write the lyrics for a song about the water cycle that would be fun and educational for elementary students who are learning about that concept in science class. |
I was actually very happy with the results and did not make any changes to them. However, you can certainly re-prompt the AI to make adjustments as needed, or make your own edits from the first draft that the chatbot creates.
And of course there are many excellent chatbots you can use to write the lyrics, and you may want to test out several of them to see which gives you the best results. Some options include:
- ChatGPT - chatgpt.com
- Microsoft Copilot - copilot.microsoft.com
- Google Gemini - gemini.google.com
- Claude (from Anthropic) - claude.ai
- PI AI - pi.ai
- Mistral AI - mistral.ai
- Meta AI (Facebook) - meta.ai
🎤 Making the Song
Once I had the lyrics, I then needed another AI tool to write the music and sing the song. Some of the current best options include:
- Udio - https://www.udio.com/
- Suno - https://suno.com/
For this particular song I went with Udio. I could have had Udio also write the lyrics, but from experience I have had better success with creating the lyrics in a traditional AI chatbot, and then just having Udio so the music and singing.
To begin with I gave Udio a simple prompt, which also include some suggestions for musical styles:
| a song about the water cycle for elementary students, pop, pop rap, hip hop |
Because I already had my lyrics, I chose "Custom" for the lyrics and pasted in the first verse and chorus. Udio will only generate 30 seconds of the song at one time, so you need to create the song in pieces.
Next Udio generated two versions of the song, each with a somewhat different musical style. I was happy with one of them, but if not, you can always have Udio generate another set of examples, and can even adjust the musical styles in the prompt.
Once I was happy with the first part of the song, I then clicked on the "Extend" option next to that track. This allows you to add another 30 seconds to the song by choosing "Add Intro Before", "Add Section Before", "Add Section After", or "Add Outro After".
I chose to add a section after the current track, and then pasted in the second verse and chorus.
Again this generated two sample versions of the song with the additional lyrics added on. I chose my favorite and repeated this process two more times to add in all of the verses, choruses, and the outro at the end.
At any point along the way you can download any versions of the song. Simply click on the 3-dots button to the right of the track and choose the "Download" option. This will give you an MP3 file that you can use any way you want.
🎬 Making the Video
At this point I could have stopped with the MP3 version of the song, but I decided to make a music video with it just for fun. To get the video clips for the song I used Pixabay - https://pixabay.com/videos/ - which offers completely free video clips that can be used any way you need.
Pixabay is one of my favorite sources for free videos, as well as images, audio, and more. For more free media resources, check out my help guide at https://bit.ly/curts-freemedia and my blog post on "Free Media Resources for Projects".
I then used Camtasia Studio to put the video clips and the song together, but you could use whatever video editing tool you prefer. Some good options would include:
- ClipChamp - https://clipchamp.com/en/video-editor/
- CapCut - https://www.capcut.com/
- WeVideo - https://www.wevideo.com/
- LumaFusion - https://luma-touch.com/
🏁 Conclusion
AI tools can truly empower anyone to create. Although I am not gifted in playing or singing music (trust me, you do not want to hear me at Karaoke!) I was still able to create a fun and engaging song that could help students learn about the water cycle.
Of course you could create many other types of songs with AI, such as songs to celebrate colleagues or students, songs for holidays, songs for school spirit, and more. I would love to hear what you make! Please feel free to share your songs and ideas.
Post by Eric Curts
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