Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 32 posts

Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

#11

Post by hombre_fatal »

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #8
scarecrowbob wrote: post #7

Not a criticism of reality or the question, but an unrelated observation: I find it super interesting that were at a point in time where we would find it faster to ask a computer to randomly generate a short sequence of notes rather than just, like, writing them out. This is a good example of a class of problem where it would be so much easier for me to describe any of several workflows: punch it into Dorico directly…

On the flip side, I think we’re gonna lose a ton by not having to actively think when trying to accomplish a task like this. I had an engineering professor in college who talked about the amount of math he was able to do in his head early in his career before taking a job that needed a calculator. It wasn’t long after he took that job that he noticed he lost most of his advanced mental math skills. On the music stuff…

You could create your own music by hand, but presumably someone wants to generate music because they want to target a specific skill like playing on the fly rather than playing something they just spent 15min writing.

Just like you might want to practice reading a foreign language with paragraphs you haven’t seen before, not the paragraphs you just wrote yourself. Certainly a useful skill to be able to write yourself, but not necessarily the skill you want to practice every time you want to practice reading.

I don’t see the problem.

Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

#12

Post by macintux »

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #8
scarecrowbob wrote: post #7

Not a criticism of reality or the question, but an unrelated observation: I find it super interesting that were at a point in time where we would find it faster to ask a computer to randomly generate a short sequence of notes rather than just, like, writing them out. This is a good example of a class of problem where it would be so much easier for me to describe any of several workflows: punch it into Dorico directly…

On the flip side, I think we’re gonna lose a ton by not having to actively think when trying to accomplish a task like this. I had an engineering professor in college who talked about the amount of math he was able to do in his head early in his career before taking a job that needed a calculator. It wasn’t long after he took that job that he noticed he lost most of his advanced mental math skills. On the music stuff…

I wrote recently about how much sense of location I've lost by using GPS, but at the same time, it's a huge boon for exploring. Everything in life is a tradeoff.

Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

#13

Post by charred_patina »

Everyone is recommending MusicXML which works very well, but for training/generative purposes the issue is that MusicXML has a lot of tags and a recursive structure that severely limits the output length. I have had success with getting ChatGPT to output .ABC files, and even luck training small transformers to output syntactically correct .ABC files. .ABC files also have some data in the header section like the key signature, tempo, and time signature, so you could add that to your prompt as well.

This blog post has some .ABC files you can see as an example:

https://gwern.net/gpt-2-music

Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

#14

Post by kevinmchugh »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #11
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, I think we’re gonna lose a ton by not having to actively think when trying to accomplish a task like this. I had an engineering professor in college who talked about the amount of math he was able to do in his head early in his career before taking a job that needed a calculator. It wasn’t long after he took that job that he noticed he lost most of his advanced mental math skills. On the music stuff…

You could create your own music by hand, but presumably someone wants to generate music because they want to target a specific skill like playing on the fly rather than playing something they just spent 15min writing. Just like you might want to practice reading a foreign language with paragraphs you haven’t seen before, not the paragraphs you just wrote yourself. Certainly a useful skill to be able to write yourself…

it's a series of notes with the same mathematical relationship to one another. It's like the times tables, you should memorize them and writing them down is another mode to help memorization

Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

#15

Post by NikolaNovak »

macintux wrote: post #12
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, I think we’re gonna lose a ton by not having to actively think when trying to accomplish a task like this. I had an engineering professor in college who talked about the amount of math he was able to do in his head early in his career before taking a job that needed a calculator. It wasn’t long after he took that job that he noticed he lost most of his advanced mental math skills. On the music stuff…

I wrote recently about how much sense of location I've lost by using GPS, but at the same time, it's a huge boon for exploring. Everything in life is a tradeoff.

I'm one of the rare people who are the opposite. But! I always keep my gps in map mode, North up. I also zoom out as much as possible or show the full trip on screen (in units that support it). So gps is a huge noon to me building a mental map of places and their orientation to one another.

(Everybody else in my life uses go's on default "your direction is up" and it's worthless. You follow directions and have no idea which way you're going or how far :-()

Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

#16

Post by pseudocomposer »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #11
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the flip side, I think we’re gonna lose a ton by not having to actively think when trying to accomplish a task like this. I had an engineering professor in college who talked about the amount of math he was able to do in his head early in his career before taking a job that needed a calculator. It wasn’t long after he took that job that he noticed he lost most of his advanced mental math skills. On the music stuff…

You could create your own music by hand, but presumably someone wants to generate music because they want to target a specific skill like playing on the fly rather than playing something they just spent 15min writing. Just like you might want to practice reading a foreign language with paragraphs you haven’t seen before, not the paragraphs you just wrote yourself. Certainly a useful skill to be able to write yourself…

So, as someone who made a living for a time with piano sightreading skills… there’s already a near-endless supply of free sheet music to practice sightreading with. I guess you could use it as an input for some LLM and practice against its outputs… but just… why? Part of the benefit of practicing sightreading (in a non-paid context) is that you’re playing material that you might have to “sightread” for money (quoted here because yes, it may be the second or third time you’ve seen it… sightreading vs. memorizing a piece is a whole spectrum, but customers only really care if you can play things well). I guess, there could be a market for sightreading LLM-generated music (“write me Chopin lines but with Monk chord progressions”)… at a cocktail party… for an audience that was into that? This seems really unnatural and unlikely to me though.

Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

#17

Post by bstpierre »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #15
macintux wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote recently about how much sense of location I've lost by using GPS, but at the same time, it's a huge boon for exploring. Everything in life is a tradeoff.

I'm one of the rare people who are the opposite. But! I always keep my gps in map mode, North up. I also zoom out as much as possible or show the full trip on screen (in units that support it). So gps is a huge noon to me building a mental map of places and their orientation to one another. (Everybody else in my life uses go's on default "your direction is up" and it's worthless. You follow directions and have no ide…

TIL there's a "north is up" setting! I always found this frustrating because my mental model is also "north is up", and when zoomed in I can get confused by "your direction is up".

Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

#19

Post by skybrian »

scarecrowbob wrote: post #7

Not a criticism of reality or the question, but an unrelated observation: I find it super interesting that were at a point in time where we would find it faster to ask a computer to randomly generate a short sequence of notes rather than just, like, writing them out. This is a good example of a class of problem where it would be so much easier for me to describe any of several workflows: punch it into Dorico directly…

I guess this is a different kind of training altogether, but I’m having fun coming up with exercises to do entirely in my head. Scales don’t need to be practiced at a keyboard.

I’m an amateur and partially self-taught so I don’t know how common that is.

Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

#20

Post by unionemployee »

Thanks all. Wasn't aware of MusicXML or musescore. I do write out exercises on manuscript paper and find that the time it takes and contemplation is helpful. They're legible bug generally pretty ugly, and I don't always want my notebooks to take up space when traveling. Even when I do use tools to generate certain things, I often still write them out as a way to contemplate the music without my instrument. Also having a bunch of handwritten manuscript paper makes me feel more accomplished than I am.
Post reply on HN