No, this article wasn’t generated by ChatGPT. However, we did ask the complex AI bot about five ways it could help with music-making tasks and this was what it came up with.
Developed by AI research company OpenAI, ChatGPT is based on GPT-3.5, a state-of-the-art language model that can be used for natural language processing tasks such as text generation and language translation. The tool was launched in November 2022 and has since been making waves across the internet for its detailed and often shockingly human-like responses to queries.
In short, you can ask ChatGPT anything and it will — at least in theory — deliver.
While ChatGPT can generate music, it tells us too, that it is not a music composition software nor “a replacement for human creativity” and musical know-how. “It can be used as an inspiration tool or a tool to generate new ideas, but the quality of the output will depend on the input and the specific use-case,” the bot describes its talents.
For now, ChatGPT is free to use, though a ‘professional’ version priced at $42 a month is reportedly being trialled. Before you decide to splash the cash though, let’s find out what the hottest AI chatbot in town is capable of when it comes to music-making.
You can use ChatGPT to generate lyrics for a song, or even complete a song by giving it a title or a theme to work with.
Here are some prompts to help you get started:
“Write me a [artist] song about [theme]”
“Write a lyrical verse in the style of [artist] about [topic]”
“Write the lyrics to a song titled ____”
You can use ChatGPT to generate melodies and chord progressions for a song or even generate entire compositions. Just remember that ChatGPT is a text-based model after all, which means you will need to input some pretty specific information on things like style, instrumentation, and tempo for the bot to work.
Users can also expand on existing musical parts by feeding the bot a guitar tab from sites like Ultimate-Guitar with prompts like “Continue this guitar pattern”. Just keep in mind that the results often turn out highly experimental — in a ten-year-old attempting their first composition kinda way — and you’ll be fine.
You can use ChatGPT to analyse music and generate summaries, reviews, or comparisons. Though we’ve found that getting the bot to write a bad review of your least favourite band is still a work in progress.
You can use ChatGPT to generate music in a specific style or genre, or even compose music in the style of a specific artist or band.
Unfortunately, ChatGPT couldn’t deliver on its fifth method of music-making assistance: transcribing audio files to MIDI or sheet music.
Well, either that or we just couldn’t find the right commands to get it to transcribe Darude’s Sandstorm. Other users have reported similar instances of the AI confidently overpromising on its capabilities – but who knows what a year, five years or even a decade of development could lead to?
