Got ChatGPT to make Music 🎶

Prompting
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Okay, so I saw a lot of music YouTubers fail miserably to make music with ChatGPT.

I luckily took some screenshots before OpenAi wiped their Chat History :face_with_raised_eyebrow:

ChatGPT is completely competent to make music, but you have to give it a few directions.

As a creative person, I talk to ChatGPT like it was a human, and not a machine.

So my first chats in a conversation usually looks like this:

“Can you help me make music?”

Where it replies, that it is ready to help me.

First, it tried to get to give me Guitar Tabs, but I’m a Piano Player.

So I asked it to give me Piano Chords.

Then I asked it to give me all chords in a chord key.

Which it managed completely fine.

In December I tried it to give me the notes for “Have Yourself a Merry Christmas”

However, it gave me notes in a key that didn’t fit the song. After an Hour Q&A with it, it apologized and claimed the original version was different than the version I played.

The way I got it to admit it faults, was to type the notes as Letters along with octave position:

G4-A4-B4 etc…

It tried multiple times to generate the old notes, but when I finally gave it the key scale, it gave up trying to correct me.

Now, onto the screenshots. (I expected them to be below the post, and not inside it)

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I haven’t looked at the screenshots in ages, so I don’t remember the order I took them in, in the conversation.

That being said, it’s a very good composer.

I think I got it to make a song, and I meant melody, but it gave me lyrics.

Fair enough, my bad.

But since I already had the lyrics, I asked if to give me chords to accompany the lyrics.

I haven’t tested to play them yet, but the chord order seems to be correc notation.

Then I asked it for a melody, and it gave a very bland melody with few note changes. Very monotone soundscape.

I asked it to make it more singable, and it did.

Another discovery which was very pleasing, was that it could give chords in Roman Numerals.

It also gave me chords in Dorian, Mixolydian, Aeolian modes.

Conclusion:
It’s very capable of creating music, you just have to be very clear of what output you want to receive.

It’s sort of like a Teenager asking mom where a certain bowl is.

Mom answers: In the cupboard.

The teenager didn’t specific which bowl he was looking for, so mom answers in a non-specific manner as the cupboard is the most likely location for a bowl according to her dataset / memory.

By asking: “where is the popcorn bowl?” Mom can say which cupboard it is in.

It’s the same way with music. You have to give it specific instructions that usually is visual information.

If you give it a 4/4 beat, which key, the characteristics of the melody, what kind of chord progression.

It can create beautiful notation, and very handy tables of music theory.

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I like Your conclusion. I think it applies on anything little more complex that you might want to use ChatGPT. Well written example. Thank You.

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This is cool. Now you just need VALL-E to sing it!

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Thank you for reminding me of my project! I tried to get it to work with ChatGPT to no avail, but I might give it another go by giving text-davinci-003 a few-shot prompt with my ASCII sheet music blanks:

       _
|-----|-)---|------------------------------------------------------
|     |/    |
|-----/-----|------------------------------------------------------
|    /|     |
|---/-|-----|------------------------------------------------------
|  /  |__   |
|-/--(*)-\--|——-—--------------------------------------------------
||    |   | |
|-\___|__/--|------------------------------------------------------
|     |     |
|   (*)     |
|           |
|---__------|------------------------------------------------------
| /    \ (*)|
|-(*)---\---|------------------------------------------------------
|       |(*)|
|-------|---|------------------------------------------------------
|      /    |
|-----/-----|------------------------------------------------------
|           |
|-----------|------------------------------------------------------

Feel free to try it yourself!

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Maybe you could setup GPT-3 to write notes in letters, then use Zapier, Pabbly, Make or something similar to send the notes to a music notation software :thinking:

It feels a bit redundant to have it in ASCII. Even if it was too work, it’s not a pleasant way to read music.

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Any tries on IDM music? it was a trend in the 90’s in wich allegedly was based on raw math… so if you are not looking for it to play a specific song, it might be easy for it to code nice hearing music using a “music.py” lib

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I was born in 1992, so never heard of that. I’m a music producer not a developer, so no idea what you talk about sorry

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I’ve had some success using GPT-4 to write music by asking it to write the music in midi format. It wrote a script in python that generated a midi file that was somewhat interesting, although maybe bland. It was only sixteen measures. But something fun to think about.

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This is really cool. When creating videos, it’s often necessary to customize the music according to the scene. I am currently using an AI music generator, but I hope that GPT can also develop in this direction. Using pre-made music doesn’t fit well with new creations, so just like with text, music always needs something new.

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There is a GPT on the ChatGPT store called Song Maker with 50k conversations that can make or edit MIDI files from prompts. Its not Suno level at all, but I don’t think Suno can output MIDI yet.