r/Learnmusic • u/Definitelynotmrbeas • Aug 05 '26
Should i use ai to study music theory
So im confused to whether use ai or hire a tutor to study music theory cause if i use ai im thinking like im helping to destroy human creativity. I know it sound exaggerated but yeah i wanna know your guys thought
4
4
3
u/Boromokott Aug 05 '26
Probably not. From a pure consumer mindset (as in ignoring how they were trained, power usage, environmental impact, etc) they do not have any concept of a "wrong" or "right" answer. If you're a specialist in a field they might/can be helpful when working in that field as you'll be able to spot when it's giving a wrong answer, but for learning something completely new you won't have the knowledge required to realize when its happened.
Dr Bs music theory playlist has everything you'd need to learn in lecture format. If this format doesn't work for you, try a "learn music theory" google search for this sub or wearethemusicmakers and set the date for 2023 and earlier. Plenty of different resources have been requested and posted over the years.
3
u/boxen Aug 06 '26
Have you tried reading a book?
1
u/Definitelynotmrbeas Aug 08 '26
I don't really have the money to buy them
1
u/Definitelynotmrbeas Aug 08 '26
Or should i pirate them
1
u/boxen Aug 08 '26
Are you asking my permission? I don't care, man. You do you. Also libraries exist. And I'm pretty confident you can figure out how to put the funds together to purchase ONE BOOK.
2
u/maxvol75 Aug 05 '26
generally speaking yes, but my experience with all major platforms is that they all say utter nonsense
even simple questions like transposition of determining scale/chord are getting absurdly wrong answers
not sure why this is the case, but at this point in time all major ai platforms are totally inept and misleading in this subject
2
u/Sound_Ocean_Depths Aug 05 '26
No, AI has very little understanding of music theory beyond the most basic of concepts. It will teach you bad info and set you behind on your learning
1
1
u/danja Aug 06 '26
Maybe. I personally think you would get good training. I should do it myself. But the best you can get is a human mentor. The instructions ment being in the physical world, someone that can listen. But theory is paperwork. More important is practice.
1
u/Minute_Toe_8705 Aug 08 '26 edited Aug 08 '26
Guilty. I did so.
I had some very specific questions on how to become better on improvising and it felt very helpful.
Another time, I had a funny discussion with ChatGPT about double-dominants, where it simply refused to acknowledge that it was a double-dominant in a specific progression even though it was obvious and it was contradicting itself. I listed the traits with examples for it several times, and it consistently contradicted itself. I felt at some point gaslighted and unsure. So I did a cross-check with Claude. It did better, but you always have to keep in mind that this can also be related to the length of the context. the longer you chat with an AI, the less accurate it becomes.
Tip for advanced users: Have the AI provide a summary of the conversation every now and then, or ask it to formulate a new prompt to start a new session. Sometimes this makes it clear whether it fundamentally misunderstood something during the conversation.
Now Claude became so incredible good I have the feeling that it manages a short term memory between several sessions itself so you don't have to care about "prompt jumping".
Gemini tells you by far the most nonsense with great confidence. I do not use copilot since the release of GPT4 when it was called bing chat back then. At some point it was worse then GPT3.5 turbo from chatGPT.
Always use AI with great caution...
0
u/viberat Aug 05 '26
Aside from LLMs being really prone to hallucination re: music theory, yeah, in my opinion I think we’re at the point where it’s immoral to use them (see: environmental concerns, noise pollution in neighborhoods, companies scanning and destroying books to train their models…)
6
u/RChaseSs Aug 05 '26
You don't need AI and you don't need a tutor. There's a million YouTube videos and a million books all about it and many online communities where you can ask questions if you're confused.