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Ask HN: AI that produces sheet music for practice?

by unionemployee on 8/5/23, 8:34 PM with 30 comments

• by scarecrowbob on 8/6/23, 2:28 PM

  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, 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.

• by singhrac on 8/6/23, 1:59 PM

  You 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.

• by joeld42 on 8/6/23, 5:07 PM

  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.

• by brusselssprouts on 8/6/23, 2:05 PM

  I 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.

• by charred_patina on 8/6/23, 3:06 PM

  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

• by unionemployee on 8/6/23, 4:23 PM

  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.

• by zeckalpha on 8/6/23, 1:57 PM

  ChatGPT can generate Lilypond syntax. There's some wrinkles, but the basics like this can be done.

• by gus_massa on 8/6/23, 1:51 PM

  Looks 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.

• by iancmceachern on 8/6/23, 6:15 PM

  Why? Can't you just look those things up? Wouldn't this just be a sheet music search engine? Surely all of these exercises have been written down at some point

• by Finnucane on 8/6/23, 3:51 PM

  There are already practice books filled with that kind of thing.

• by im3w1l on 8/6/23, 2:03 PM

  MusicXML 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.

• by brandoniscool on 8/6/23, 6:59 PM

  www.nevertwenty.live is will give you the chords to any song want.

• by ioisar on 8/6/23, 7:38 PM

  Imslp.org