u/L0wLif4

This sounds way too familiar, but I haven’t been able to find out to what song. At first I thought it was Ed Sheeran, but doesn’t seem to be the case. Any thoughts?

https://suno.com/s/AfyFCgyIXRDSvjS5

TL;DR: I built a Codex + Suno workflow “trained” on Swedish pop songwriting principles (Max Martin style) to see if structured prompting could generate more convincing AI pop songs. The results are still AI-ish, but noticeably closer to real “Stockholm hit factory” music than blind prompting Suno.

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I have been trying to replicate Swedish pop/rock//dance/edm (Max Martin et al.) with OpenAI and Suno. 

I’m not into Swedish pop-mill stuff but figured because of how formulaic and well studied this phenomenon is, and how many thousands of hits have been produced and used for GenAI training, it may be a good fit for this challenge.

So I started by setting up an agentic songwriting environment with VSCode and Codex similar to what one would use for coding.

I have spent some time reading and trying to understand how tools like Suno work behind the scenes. 

Besides a stunt in small-town teenage rock bands I also have a degree in CS, so I can read some of the boring academic stuff.

My rough understanding is that during training, models like Suno’s have learned the correlation between lyric patterns, genres, emotional wording and production styles.

What this means is if your lyrics already “sound” country, and the style says “modern country,” the conditioning signals reinforce each other. 

Similarly if your lyrics imply one thing and your style implies another, the model has competing constraints.

So the purpose here is to have a process capable of generating lyrics as if they already belong to the genre, then use the style to describe production, not to fight the lyrics.

The Codex/VSC setup is well documented online so I won’t go into the specifics there, but basically there’s a file called AGENTS.md where I define the workflow and all the rules for lyrics composition (I don’t use Skills for anything yet)

Here’s some of the stuff I have in AGENTS.md:

Definition of inputs and outputs (story, style, lyrics and Suno style)

Reference song analysis with instructions to reinterpret the input story metaphorically if it conflicts with the style, so it matches the vibe.

Guidelines on how to write the lyrics using Max Martin principles. This is data I have previously (manually) collected; there are plenty of studies, even academic papers written about the guy. So I have instructions to prioritize melody, strength and syllable symmetry, add title in the chorus, emphasize repetition, bold emotions, etc, etc. It’s all in the studies about MM production style.

Additional composition rules (my own, based on trial and error): how to bridge and final chorus, prevent filler metaphors, create strong line callbacks, encourage emotional and sensory imagery, plus some examples of good and bad compositions.

Chorus design: a strategy to build emotional pull towards chorus, ascending tension, introduction of contrast, use of hooks, punctuation and casing, among other stuff I got also from Max Martin papers.

I also have references to two external files: 1) a lyric word bank organized by categories like emotion, action and movement, time and place, intensity, imagery and texture, etc and 2) a blacklist for words I don’t want to see in the lyrics (you know, those echoes, neon lights, etc)

The next section has rules on how to use the lyrics to shape phrasing like casing to signal lift and genre appropriate words, with some examples (LLMs like examples, so I have them everywhere)

Next, I have the instructions on how to generate the Suno style and some final guidelines for coherence between lyrics and music. And there is also a self test with a regen instruction if the test fails, which I am not entirely sure how well it works.

And finally, there’s a reference to a resources folder where I have all the documentation I found about Swedish pop mills and Max Martin production style and his workflow. The idea is that Codex will use these files instead of going out to the internet to learn about how to write the lyrics.

That’s all for the songwriting environment, which is like 95% of the workflow.

For the next step, I go find a song, ideally a Swedish hit and ask Codex to give me the story and the metadata including bpm, chord progression, vocal type, instrumentation highlights and production feel. 

Edit: I ask for a high level story not a detailed explanation of the lyrics, so that I don’t constrain Codex too much, while at the same time give it some boundaries. For example “this song is about losing the love of your life and fighting to get them back”. That’s enough.

If the song is popular and has been around for a while, it is likely someone already studied it, dissected it, published the findings and the OpenAI trained on that information. Codex can always make it up of course, so this step may require additional manual verification because it is important to have it right.

Once I have the story and the metadata I give it to Codex and simply ask it to write lyrics for it. Codex will go fetch AGENTS.md so I don’t have to provide any additional context.

By the way there is nothing in this prompt to Codex that would directly identify the original track, no artist name or lyrics excerpts. Although I guess with enough information Codex could identify the track. Anything is possible.

The lyrics by Codex are generally pretty decent out of the gate.

There are still some odd things which I attribute to Codex trying to be too faithful to the Swedish formula; some of the lines in the lyrics just don’t make sense or are plain weird, and that’s a Max Martin signature (I Want It That Way). Like me, he’s not a native English speaker, which has helped him push odd lines just because the sound fits, something a native speaker would probably not do.

When I initially see the lyrics output  by Codex I feel tempted to manually intervene and fix them a bit, but then I decide to trust the process and leave them as they are to see what Suno does.

Here are some tracks Codex and Suno generated with this workflow.

https://suno.com/s/VnoMlZasu1PZpckh
https://suno.com/s/ee9q1itXsWLPdICo
https://suno.com/s/Ps42HbN6XZEnVjwC

My biased opinion: I don’t think these are hits and definitely suffer from typical AI artifacts particularly in the vocals, but I think they do have that Swedish pop mill vibe (and its subgenres) and also sound better to what you typically get by just prompting Suno blind.

I can imagine, if you are an experienced producer in Stockholm (or anywhere), you can definitely use tools like these to at least create a blueprint of a track or parts of it, maybe the catchy melody, polish it and produce it with a real artist. It would be hard for me to believe this is not happening already.