RNA the Musical

Tyhry and Marda in the Casanay RNA laboratory.

  Having completed the 48,000 word-long science fiction story "The RNA Seeds", I used Google's Flow Music to turn "The RNA Seeds" into a musical. That musical version of the story (titled "RNA the Musical") ended up including 26 songs, each about 3 minutes in duration.

 Google's Flow Music has a feature called "Spaces" which I used to make an alien voice synthesizer and a tool for displaying illustrated liner notes for each song. These were my first two experiments in vibe coding. The user interface for the liner notes display tool is shown below in Figure 1...

Figure 1. The liner notes Space for "RNA the Musical". Created by vibe coding.

Figure 3. Flow Music tabs.

 I ran into several problems while experimenting with Google's Flow Music. I've still never paid for any AI service, so everything described on this blog page pertains to the free version of Google's Flow Music. I started with Google's Flow Music by using an older version of the Firefox browser and I created an account with the user name "Tyhry". Quite quickly, I created a second account with user name "Eddy Watson" which I use with Google's Chrome browser. However, there seem to be bugs in Google's Flow Music (see below in Figure 2) that are so severe as to occasionally crash even my newer computer when running Chrome.

Figure 2. A Flow Music error message.

 

Figure 4. User preferences.

The main set of tabs in the Flow Music user interface is shown to the right in Figure 3. The tab that is labeled "Tyhry FREE" opens up another set of tabs that are essentially user preferences and user-specific information such as "credits" (see Figure 4, to the left). A new Flow Music account starts with 500 credits. I get a deduction of credits when I use Flow Music's AI to generate songs, but each day I get some "daily free credits".

Clicking on the "Profile" tab that is shown in Figure 3, opens a profile page like the one shown below in Figure 5. Flow Music makes it fairly effortless to add images. You can either enter a text prompt and get an AI-generated image or you can upload images the are 5 MB and smaller. Shown in Figure 5, below, is a banner image for the "Tyhry" account that was made using Google's text-to-image Flow software. In many of my science fiction stories, I like to imagine that Tyhry is a human variant, a tryp'At.

Figure 5. Flow Music user profile page for user "Tyhry".

Figure 6. Account settings.

One of the Google Flow Music features is seen above in Figure 5. As long as you are using Google's Flow Music, at the bottom of your browser page is a song player.

Image for "Load Bearing".

In a user's account settings (see Figure 6, to the right), one of the options is to force "clean lyrics only". Apparently, when active, this preference setting ensures that all song lyrics Flow Music generates will be PG and not include "dirty" words. In my own songs, I have not explored how "dirty" Flow Music can get (but see "Kindred Dick"). When I searched for "dirty" I found "Low-Down Dirty". My search for "sexy" turned up "Sexy Temptress". The only song that Flow Music generated for me which seems at all "racy" is "Load Bearing". 

Some of the
lyrics for
"Load Bearing"

The song "Load Bearing" was generated spontaneously by Flow Music while it was making up "alien voices" for several of the characters in "The RNA Seeds" (see this session). "Load Bearing" is a song for Klaudy the robot, who is a character in "The RNA Seeds". During that vibe coding session, the Flow Music "Producer" AI had just worked on a voice for Systolina when it then suggested, "Klaudy the Manikoid robot might be an interesting contrast with those "industrial mechanical textures." I clicked on one of the AI-generated "suggested replies" which was "Refine Klaudy's voice". Google's Flow Music then generated the lyrics for the song "Load Bearing".

"Learn More"

Google's Flow Music has an annoying "system" of credits, points, levels and badges. Users begin in the "learning" level and can progress to a "debut" level after "earning" 1000 points. The tab/page titled "Customize Producer" (see below, Figure 7) can be reached by clicking on the tab in the main interface (Figure 3) that displays your current number of points.

Figure 7. The "Customize Producer"page/tab.

One of my Google Flow Music playlists (titled "Meta Music" is for songs about the "joys" of using Flow Music and other AI software. Google's Flow Music automatically remembers things about users. What the AI has learned about you can be viewed by clicking the "Memories" tab that is on the "Customize Producer" page (Figure 7). One of the things that Flow Music has learned about me is: "user often creates songs satirizing their experience with Producer and the platform's limitations"

Flow Music Blurb.
Click image to enlarge.

There is a blog for Flow Music which seems to have only one entry from March 2025. I suppose Google has a rule that all of its "apps" need to have a blog, so ✅.

Figure 8. Flow Music on Discord.

I believe that this is the main page for Flow Music documentation, which quickly links users to a discord server. Back when Goggle's Whisk was still in existence, I explored the discord for Whisk and found it to be pretty useless, so I did not rush to investigate the Flow Music discord server space. The "good folks" at Google Labs seem to enjoy spewing jargon on their Discord server space. 

Figure 9. Google Labs on Discord.

I find the entire Discord interface to be confusing and irritating to navigate (see Figure 9 for an example). 

pay for x-tra features

Of course, they have some kind of freemium system with for-pay services and advertising that supports the whole Discord operation, but I use an ad blocker on my browser, so who knows what I'm missing?

I'm certainly not missing the annoying Discord popup windows that are integral to the Discord software and can't be blocked by an ad blocker (example in Figure 10, below). 

Judging from what I see on the Google Flow Music discord server,  Flow Music has gone through several iterations since 2022 including an existence as "Riffusion" before being acquired by Google in early 2026.

Figure 10. An X-box ad on Discord.

Duet format

The first thing I found on the Flow Music discord server was a tutorial from a user who is struggling to get Flow Music to do what they want it to do. I suspect that the people at Google do not even know how Flow Music works. They bought the Producer AI from someone else and they can't even explain to users how to use it.

The second thing I found on the Flow Music discord server was the recommendation to use "Da Vinci Resolve" rather than Flow Music. Based on what I see in the 179 MB instruction manual for Da Vinci Resolve, it is similar to iMovie and allows you to put together music and video tracks.

The third thing I found on the Flow Music discord server was discussion of long-term users of Riffusion trying to adapt to the changes that have been made to the software by Google. 

I then searched the Flow Music discord server space for "duet" and found a set of instructions from what looks like some random user (see the image to the right). I tried asking Producer about those instructions and it agreed they seem reasonable. I really dislike software for which users are forced to guess how to use it.

Other Problems. The chat sessions with Producer have a length limit. When I was building a Space (see the song "Flow Music Spaces"), I ran into the length limit and that inspired another song ("Vibecode 22").

Flow Music struggles to pronounce many English words correctly.

 Flow Music seemingly randomly repeats some song lyrics lines and drops other lines.

 As for all generative AI systems, users have to experiment and find out what the limitations of Flow Music are and try to work around those limitations. Here are instructions created by Claude:

Figure 11. Helpful instructions by Claude. Click to enlarge.

 To make "RNA the Musical", I provided song ideas and song titles to Claude. Claude then generated lyrics for each song along with music production instructions. Those lyrics and music production instructions were then provided to Flow Music which generated the music for each song.  

If you click on the "Flow Music" button in the upper left corner of the Flow Music interface (see Figure 3) it opens up a "welcome" page that looks like this:

Figure 11. Flow Music welcome page. Google's User Interface Philosophy: "Love That Whitespace."

 

Figure 12. Flow Music "Song" tab.

I don't like the Flow Music welcome page; it makes my computer over-heat. The default for the song list is "featured", but you can switch to a couple of other views if you want to browse what songs have been created recently by users. I have no idea what qualifies songs to be "featured".

The Flow Music "Song" tab is shown in Figure 12. This shows all of the songs that a user has generated. Songs can be "published", which makes them visible to other users. You can also "follow" other users, but I don't really understand all the benefits that accrue from following someone on Flow Music.

Figure 13. Following.

"When a user you follow shares a track publicly, you gain the ability to use the Remix function. You can extend their audio sections, swap musical parts, or tweak their baseline tracks with your own AI instructions." 

"By keeping tabs on specific profiles, you can follow the 'flow' of their creative sessions, find out what parameters they use to guide their AI studio 'Producer', and borrow structural elements like specific instrument configurations or custom drum machine patterns." 

Figure 14. A "typical" user.

User's like "imnotningning" (see Figure 14) are pretty common on Flow Music, people who show up, make a song or two, then never return.   

User grufel is a much more active Flow Music user. As far as I can tell, only a person's published songs are visible to other users. It would be cool if following another user gave access to their unpublished songs, also.

For example, right now I have generated 161 songs, but I've only published 55 of those. Often when a prompt is given to Flow Music, two versions of the same song are generated. Sometimes three versions are generated and the user is asked to provide feedback for which one is not as good.

Users can write a 250 character-long self-description for their user page.

 Playlists can be given 500 character descriptions, but Flow Music does not show that entire description, instead leaving a bunch of blank space on the playlist banner. 

Figure 15. More active user.

As shown in Figure 15, Flow Music users can select songs as "favorites' 👍. For example, I added the song "mother" to my favorites. I have a playlist for my favorites.

I want to mention one other tab in the main Flow Music set of tabs (see Figure 3), the "turntable" tab. Clicking on the turntable button opens up a window like the one shown in Figure 16, below.

 

Figure 16. Turntable "feature". The bait: "Earns you credits".

Figure 17. No lyrics.

 Be warned: some of the sound samples on the "turntable" are little more than noise. I feel like there should be a warning about hearing damage for those who participate in this Flow Music activity. Maybe this is one of the ways Flow Music tries to get rid of users like me who don't pay. For some of the paired song versions, I'd like to be able to vote "none of the above" rather than say which one is better.

As shown in Figure 17, some of the songs have no lyrics. Also be warned that initially the "turntable" counts you down towards 10 pairs of songs listened to. If you can survive those ten pairs, then it switches to counting you down to 20 pairs, which feels like a classic bait and switch trick. I think I got 20 credits for listening to 20 songs (10 pairs). Life is too short for that kind of nonsense. I made a song about this kind of software interface, see: "Give Me Credit(s)".

My favorite song so far: Tyhry Time. 

Related: what is MusicFX?

Next: Sci Fi baseball.

Images by Flow. Visit the Gallery of Movies, Book and Magazine Covers.