Suno AI in Music School?

What Berklee Got Wrong When It Lit the Controlled Burn

This post follows my standard early access schedule: paid subscribers today, free for everyone on June 16.

I just published a video on my YouTube channel about a question I suspect a good number of readers of The Augmented Educator will care about as well: whether a college should build a course around a heavily debated generative AI tool, and, if it does so, how it ought to handle the inevitable controversy. The following essay is meant as a companion piece to that video. It presents the information in a more readable form than just a video transcript.

I should point out that, while this text has been created with the help of AI, in particular Claude 4.8, the original video transcript was written entirely by myself without AI assistance beyond a grammar check. So, if you are interested in learning more about how AI influences my writing, I invite you to check out the video as well. I would be curious to know which one you prefer. Let me know in the comments.

But back to the original question.

The starting point for this essay is a course at the Berklee College of Music, the institution most people would name first if asked where one goes to study contemporary music. In late March 2026, Berklee’s songwriting department began heavily promoting SW-303, “Bots and Beats: AI and the Future of Songwriting,” a long-standing elective that has been reoriented around the generative audio platform Suno.

Overseen by course chair Rodney Alejandro and taught by associate professor Ben Camp, the course asks students to generate lyrics, melodies, and finished recordings in direct collaboration with the AI software. The reaction was swift and unforgiving, and it was summarized by a careful video essay titled “They Teach AI Music at Music School Now...,” from Adam Neely, a bassist, Berklee graduate, and one of the most respected music theory educators on YouTube.

Neely organized his critique into four problems the course created: branding, the school’s tendency to be out of touch, the conflation of all machine learning with Suno’s particular methods, and the fact that many people simply hate AI music.

As readers of this Substack are aware, I am not a neutral party in this discussion. I use generative AI constantly, and I defend it more openly than almost anyone in my field. But I still agree with nearly everything Neely said. I highly recommend watching his video.

What is most interesting to me is how thoroughly Berklee botched the attempt to cover generative AI music within the curriculum. I think many of us can learn from their mistakes. Introducing a destructive technology into a place built on skilled craft is not unlike a controlled burn. Foresters set fire to a forest on purpose, under tight conditions, behind containment lines, with trained crews, precisely so that a far worse fire does not later arrive on its own terms.

The fire Berklee set by offering a Suno course was therefore not the mistake. The mistake was lighting it in the dry season, with no firebreaks, and handing the torch to someone with a private reason to watch it spread. That, in essence, is what the school did.

Why I can speak to this

A quick word on why I think I can add something here.

I have spent over three decades as a technology educator, most of it on exactly the kind of frontier where this fight is now playing out. In the late 1990s, I was already writing about the use of computer games in education. And as far as I know, I published the very first academic paper on professional gaming, or esports, in the early 2000s, when the field was still dismissed as frivolous.

During the pandemic, I wrote and taught about blockchain and its plausible uses in the creative economy, a subject that drew its own share of eye-rolling. Premature-seeming, contested technology is, for better or worse, a specialty I built my academic career on.

But I need to be careful. I cannot claim insider knowledge of Berklee itself, and I will not pretend otherwise. However, I have spent the last twelve years teaching at a media arts and design college with several programs ranked in the national top ten. And as a department head, I have had to make exactly the decision Berklee made: whether and how to bring a disruptive, contested tool into a curriculum that highly respects the slow, manual craft of creation.

So I know, from the inside, the difference between doing it well and doing it the way Berklee did.