Listener Stories 2026 (Bronze): AI Music & Coral Crackles

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz, the stories behind the world's most recognizable and interesting sounds.

**Dallas Taylor** (0:10)
I'm Dallas Taylor.
There's nothing I love more than hearing other people tell amazing stories on Twenty Thousand Hertz. So last year, we held a competition where we invited listeners to send us fully produced short stories about sound. Basically, they were many Twenty Thousand Hertz episodes made by you, our listeners. The results were legit incredible, and we ended up filling three entire episodes with those stories. It was such a success that I knew I wanted to do it again. So now, here we are a year later with another group of outstanding stories. What you're about to hear is the first set of stories from this year, which we'll call the Bronze Collection. The Silver and Gold collections will follow later in the summer. Enjoy.
Story one by Miles.

**Miles Krueger** (1:01)
AI has gotten good at a lot of different things. From generating books, generating images, generating videos. It's gotten to the point where it's nearly impossible to differentiate AI-generated content from human-generated content. And that's scary.
Nearly every single field in industry is getting impacted by AI in some way or another. But there's this one field that people don't often think about that is getting severely impacted. And that is the music industry.
When I was in 7th grade, I did this science fair project where I tested if humans could tell the difference between human-generated content and AI-generated content. And on the first test, which was just a sentence, it was a 50-50 split on who got it right and who got it wrong. Which is just a coin flip. But that was three years ago. And AI has gotten so much better since then. So I wanted to do that same thing, but this time with music. So what I did was I sat down my brother. Okay.
Oh, wait, hold up. And I interviewed him.

**Diana** (2:07)
My name is Kale Kruger.

**Miles Krueger** (2:08)
The first song was going to be the AI-generated song, and the second song was going to be the human-generated song. I brought you here, do you?

**Diana** (2:13)
Nope.

**Miles Krueger** (2:14)
Okay. So I want you to put these headphones on, okay? Cool. And I'm going to play for you two songs. You ready to hear the first one? Yep. So the first song was written by Suno AI, and I have to admit, it's really good.
And the second song is Deliver My Love, original composition by Vitamin String Quartet.
I like them. You like them both? One of those songs was made by AI. Okay. Song one or song two? Which one do you think it is? Song two. Seems a little bit off. I can't see it. Okay. You want to know what it was? It was song one. Isn't that crazy? Did you think it was good song? Yeah, kind of. Well, no. Did you think it was a good song before I told you it was AI?
All righty. Well, thank you very much. So AI already fooled one human, but what about other humans? Would you mind introducing yourself?

**Dallas Taylor** (3:27)
I'm Abby Krueger.

**Miles Krueger** (3:27)
I'm 13 years old.

**SPEAKER_7** (3:28)
I'm Gail Mashen.

**Miles Krueger** (3:39)
One of those was made by AI.

**SPEAKER_5** (3:41)
I don't know. I'm terrible at this.

**Miles Krueger** (3:43)
I think it would be the second one.
I didn't stop at those four people. I wanted to get even more responses. So I put it in an online form and got a total of 11 responses on that. Here's the thing, only three people out of that 11 got it correct, which for me is kind of mind-blowing because the AI fooled people that a human song was written by AI and likewise that the AI song was a human. And that's what interests me. I also asked respondents if they would listen to AI music by choice. And everyone said no. Everyone was in agreement on no AI music. From everyone I interviewed, no one said I would listen to AI music by choice. And I have to agree with them. Even if it is as good or better than human music, I'm still going to support the humans that put their time into it.
AI isn't getting smaller and it isn't getting any less good at making things. At the time of recording in the past week, Utah just approved an AI data center two times the size of Manhattan. And that, that is scary. It's going to be harder for musicians to get their actual human voices heard among the voices that aren't human but AI.