I’m seeing some products that transcribe songs, but I want to tell an AI to write the exercises I describe for practice purposes. For example: “Write the chromatic 7th intervals from C to B in eighth notes”
Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
1–10 of 32 posts
Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
#2Looks like an interesting idea, but I have no cue about music to help you.
Anyway, anecdote time: My wife used to play random chords in the guitar. She explained me that if you follow some rules it would sound good. I don't remember the details, something like
X -> Y or Z
Y -> X or W
Z -> X
W -> X or Y
where X, Y, Z, W are actually A, B, C, D, E, F or G, but I can't remember which ones. (Did I mention I don't play the guitar?)
So I made a program that played in the speaker 4 notes per chord, and followed those rules to select the next chord. It was surprisingly good for the low effort I made. It was not fantastic or groundbreaking, but not horrible at least.
Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
#3ChatGPT can generate Lilypond syntax. There's some wrinkles, but the basics like this can be done.
Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
#4You can ask ChatGPT to output in Lilypond format, and use https://github.com/matthunz/staff to render it; this worked for me on your above example.
Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
#5MusicXML is a fairly simple textual format that can be rendered to sheet music for printing by standard tools like say Musescore. Maybe try targetting that.
Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
#6I think you might have more luck asking it to write a script to do what you'd like. I gave ChatGPT 4 the following input:
"Please give me a python script that writes the chromatic 7th intervals from C to B in eighth notes in a convenient output format like lilypond or musicxml."
The script it gave me worked perfectly, outputting lilypond to stdout and a musicxml file that imported into musescore with no issues.
Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
#7Not 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, write it on some staff paper, put it in logic and have it output notes,
or just stick with Arban/Rabath/Rubank/Dotzaur/et al because, functionally, most useful possible permutations of exercises have been written out somewhere by some one (with the added benefit that they were probably written out by people thinking about speicfic issues like string crossings or the break on a clarinet)
Any of those seems infinitely faster it would be to figure out how to get a LLM to randomly stumble on the exercise based on its training data.
Even if I am a just a musician and not a tech bro, I'm happy that we live in a world where that seems like an easier route to randomly generate that material than to just write it out.
Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
#8Not 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 specifically, writing it out (or figuring it out on a piano) is useful because you’re going to need to commit intervals to memory anyway if your goal is to be a serious musician/composer/whatever.
Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
#9[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?
#10Looks like an interesting idea, but I have no cue about music to help you. Anyway, anecdote time: My wife used to play random chords in the guitar. She explained me that if you follow some rules it would sound good. I don't remember the details, something like X -> Y or Z Y -> X or W Z -> X W -> X or Y where X, Y, Z, W are actually A, B, C, D, E, F or G, but I can't remember which ones. (Did I mention I don't play th…
Music theory covers that. Simple harmonic progressions just work. C, F, G (or I, IV, V) is your basic starter progression. You can insert some other chords, and substitute chords (IV -> ii, V -> iii), etc. It'll sound good, but also predictable.