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Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

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

#21

Post by Raidion »

pseudocomposer wrote: post #16
hombre_fatal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amateur guitar player here, I feel like sometimes I don't know if my fingers have gotten the concept or if I've just learned a difficult passage by rote.

I'd love to have something that generates the same right hand picking pattern with a different left hand.

Also, I think there are licks that you have to be very precise with fingering or picking pattern. It would be cool to generate those.

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

#22

Post by pseudocomposer »

Raidion wrote: post #21
pseudocomposer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amateur guitar player here, I feel like sometimes I don't know if my fingers have gotten the concept or if I've just learned a difficult passage by rote. I'd love to have something that generates the same right hand picking pattern with a different left hand. Also, I think there are licks that you have to be very precise with fingering or picking pattern. It would be cool to generate those.

For the latter, I’m working on something like this with my app BeatScratch. (Though I’m currently picking it back up and updating to Dart 3 after a hiatus to work on what will be its new backend in place of Reddit…) The notation format is a bit limited but does have a novel way of choosing enharmonics (like F# vs. Gb) to maximize readability. https://beatscratch.io

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

#23

Post by joeld42 »

I use an app called SightReading factory for this https://www.sightreadingfactory.com/ . It's not exactly as you describe as it generates short, random but musical passages for sight reading, but it has a lot of options. It's good when you want to generate random passages to play through once and then discard.

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

#25

Post by spywaregorilla »

pseudocomposer wrote: post #16
hombre_fatal wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there free sheet music for popular music like there are for guitar tabs? I've tried to find this in the past but not been able.

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

#28

Post by ioisar »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #25
pseudocomposer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there free sheet music for popular music like there are for guitar tabs? I've tried to find this in the past but not been able.

Thesession.org, imslp.org

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

#29

Post by tnecniv »

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…

A lot of peers in my PhD cohort and myself were always impressed with how much more math the average dissertation seemed to contain 50 years ago when we’d flip through the copies kept in the break room. Even non-theorists had to do a lot more analysis themselves since simulations were non-existent, not accessible, or not good enough for their needs back then.

We always wondered if we were missing out on some insight or intuition by not having to churn through the mathematical analysis they did because simulation was so easy for us. On one hand, the computer can tackle situations we could never come up with a good approximation for to studying analytically. On the other hand, maybe we’d be asking our computers smarter questions if we had to grind through that stuff by hand in our own research for a few years before getting high-quality simulations.

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

#30

Post by pseudocomposer »

spywaregorilla wrote: post #25
pseudocomposer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is there free sheet music for popular music like there are for guitar tabs? I've tried to find this in the past but not been able.

MuseScore is a good source! But there is absolutely an art (with deeply mathematical influences) to producing pleasant-to-read sheet music. You’re better off paying for even mediocre songbooks, say Hal-Leonard or Alfred press, for musicians or even just genres you like, than sticking purely to free sources. For $5-20 a book (of say, 8-20 songs) I would argue it’s better to pay for it.
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