Here Comes the Son: Creating Messianic Music with AI

Album art for Here Comes the Son, my Messianic music creation with the help of AI.
A '60s British invasion pop song about the coming of Messiah. 😅

Messianic music is a big part of my life:

• I run Chavah Messianic Radio, the single largest repository of Messianic Jewish music on the web, spanning music from the last 6 decades. 
• I created MessianicChords: lyrics, guitar chords, and piano sheet music for thousands of Messianic songs, helping musicians and worship teams learn and play Messianic music at their congregations.
• I led worship at a Messianic congregation for over a decade, played with other Messianic music groups at conferences, feasts, even state fairs.
• One of my relaxing and joyful past-times is playing on my guitar and singing to the Lord, using our great legacy of Messianic, Christian, and Jewish music. I think it's great we can sing "How Great Thou Art" and "Mi Kamocha" in the same service. 🙂

I'm also involved in the tech world and I'm employed at Microsoft.

So this week when the AI music creation tool Udio went viral, I just had to try generating Messianic music with it. 😎 I thought I'd do something fun with it: a 1960s psychedelic British invasion tune singing about the coming of Messiah. Here's what I came up with:

This melody was inspired by the Beatles of the late 1960s, specifically their song Sun King. The lyrics are inspired by Isaiah 25:9, where it describes the Lord arriving and the people rejoicing. 

After a few hours of fiddling with Udio generating several dozen samples through a variety of prompts, I pieced this one together. I'm pretty happy with it! The build up to crescendo at 1:40 is :chef's kiss:

It's definitely not typical Messianic music, true, but hey, it's something fun and unique.

When I posted this on social media, a Messianic friend, Daniel Kaplan, showed me that he created an entire Passover playlist (17 songs!) using AI:

First Fruits of Zion contributor Aaron Eby tried his hand at this as well for a kids' class. He generated Inside Out, a pop song from Yeshua's words from Matthew 15 about what makes a person unclean:

Fun stuff! OK, so it's not gonna replace Paul Wilbur or Lamb. And it's not as valuable as real, human-created music. But I think these tools have the potential to help musicians create music. Much potential here! And a lot of fun.