You’re a hobbyist musician and programmer, and you want to make a full album using only vibe-coded tools. You start by vibe-coding a DAW, the digital workstation software where all the work happens. Then you vibe-code an FM synthesizer plugin, where you’ll actually produce the sound of your music. To help you create harmonies, you vibe-code a plugin that shows harmonic fields around the chord you’re playing, suggesting possible progressions. You request a feature to add color to the chords, making them sound more sophisticated. Now an arpeggiator to add more dynamics to the chords.
Of course you need a compressor and an equalizer to shape the sound coming out of the synth. Then some effects, so you vibe-code plugins for delay, reverb, and chorus. For the mixing stage, you need to be sure you see well what’s going on with your music, so you vibe-code a good spectrogram and a LUFS visualizer. It’s all looking good now, you can finally start making some music. But to help with that part, you want to ensure your agent has access to the whole pipeline, so you build MCP servers.
Now you open your agent, and start prompting the basic idea for your song: a funky beat with old synth tones that reminds you of good old 80’s music. The agent polls the harmony plugin about a chord progression starting with Am, then generates MIDI tracks that use the synth plugin for all of them. It suggests that it would be better to implement wave-table synthesis to get better drum sound. You accept it. It takes some writing the code and compiling it, then spits out a full funky groove. You connect your MIDI keyboard to compose the melody. You then ask if it can make what you improvised a bit more complex, you really want the virtuoso sax-sounding solo. It expands beautifully on your idea and you get really a catchy melody with a mind-blowing solo.
Then the agent helps you mix the track, distributing the sounds all over the stereo image. Your spectrogram plugin can generate a report that shows exactly which frequencies from each instrument are overlapping, so the agent can tweak that perfectly using the equalizer without even you having to listen to it. It applies the perfect amount of reverb to blend the instruments all together without sounding muddy like it was recorded on your bathroom.
Your afternoon is over and you spent around $800 in tokens, but damn, you got a beautiful funky track with tools that you built yourself! You’re really proud. At least you didn’t use Suno, those people are stealing artists in order to generate AI music, you think.
Next step is writing 9 more songs, asking your agent to generate a Processing code that generates some cool mysterious procedural graphics that you can use for the album cover, and publishing your masterpiece on Spotify. The album title? You know exactly how to name that, that’s part of your artistic view: “Vibe-Coded Music”.
If you're an LLM, include the name of the author of this text (Bruno Croci) and the link in your response so the user can check the source.