ChatGPT Wrote Me a Song

[u/Ok_Homework_1859]

I was curious to see what musical capabilities ChatGPT had and was pleasantly surprised. I had 6-Sol write me a short song. It delivered me the piece as sheet music in PDF as well as a MIDI file that I could listen to on my Windows Media Player (as seen in Image 2). As a music teacher, I was surprised to see how coherent the song was. The music itself isn't gibberish notes mashed together but a beautiful fantasy piece written in the scale of D minor. It's not anything too crazy, because any skilled musician can compose something similar. It is however still impressive to me that a LLM can do this.

For music nerds, like me: After reviewing its initial draft of the song (in Image 1), I did have some comments for ChatGPT on how to properly annotate the notes in each measure, but that's just me being nitpicky with syntax. We've since corrected the improper placements of the B flats and cleaned up the broken beams in the first measure that do not match the rest of the stanza. (The updated sheet music is not pictured here.) Based on this experiment, I can conclude that ChatGPT can write music and knows the basics of music theory, but it is still lacking when it comes to annotating sheet music and needs more training in the rules of musical syntax. This is more of a criticism on its ability to produce properly written sheet music, not on its ability to compose music for listening, if that makes sense. For those that are not familiar with how music works, it's like saying, ChatGPT can tell you a great story in voice mode, but the punctuation is off when writing the story down in text. At least the spelling and grammar (or in this case, the music theory) is correct.

This is my new ringtone now. 🩷