Suno hears 'live audience' and reaches for the biggest room it knows — stadium cheering, giant swells. You have to shrink the room explicitly.
Describe the small room, don't just say 'small audience':
MTV Unplugged style, small theater, 200 seats, intimate, close warm applause, you can hear individual claps
'You can hear individual claps' is the magic phrase — it tells Suno the room is tiny.
In the Exclude field: arena, stadium, massive crowd, cheering swells, echoing applause. Kill the big-room words where negatives belong.
Scrub your Style for arena invitations. Epic, massive, soaring, huge — any of these will summon the stadium even with perfect audience wording. Small-room prompts need small-room adjectives: intimate, warm, close, gentle.
Place the audience in brackets where you want it: [Verse 2: soft intimate applause fades in] — then it appears once, naturally, instead of swelling over the whole song.
If the swells persist, generate the song fully studio-clean (no audience at all), then use Replace Section or Cover on just the part where you want the room feel. Total control, no surprises.
Good luck! Hank founder of SonorixPG