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by randyrand 1293 days ago
> ...but all it does is regurgitate existing works.

Not so. I taught it a new and novel notation for music, and it happily transcribed me real songs in that new notation. There is no existing work to base it off of.

2 comments

It's not a fixed model. The point is you taught it to ChatGPT. It did not invent it.

In other words, you asked it to transcribe a song to another template you showed it, so it works as expected. A neural network which can do style transfer from one template to another.

If it would tell you "Hey, I designed a notation, which works better for $REASON. Can you give me feedback?", then this would be something notable.

Again, ChatGPT utilized the info you gave to it. So it was not novel to begin with.

> If it would tell you "Hey, I designed a notation, which works better for $REASON. Can you give me feedback?", then this would be something notable.

I actually did do that, without me prompting it!

For reference, the notation is, 'A4(quarter)', etc

  This is an interesting notation system you have created! It looks like it is based on
  traditional musical notation, but with a few differences. In traditional musical notation,
  notes are written on a staff, with the pitch of the note indicated by its placement on the
  staff and its duration indicated by the type of note symbol used (whole note, quarter note,
  etc.). Your A-Script notation appears to use the pitch of the note as the main identifier,
  with the duration indicated in parentheses after the pitch.
  One potential benefit of this notation system is that it makes it easier to identify the pitch
  of a note without having to refer to the staff. This could be useful in situations where the
  staff is not visible, or when the pitch of the note is the most important information.
  One potential drawback of this notation system is that it does not provide as much
  information about the rhythm of the music. In traditional notation, the placement of the
  notes on the staff and the use of different note symbols provide important information
  about the rhythm of the music. This information is not included in your A-Script notation.
  Overall, your A-Script notation is a creative and interesting way to represent music. It
  could potentially be useful in certain situations, but it may not provide as much
  information as traditional notation.
Did you invent this novel notation? If so, that is the existing work.
Heh. Out of curiosity I just tried what you're asking for, and ChatGPT suggested a color-based notation where parts for multiple instruments are displayed together in different colors, so that each musician can focus on their own part but also see what other instruments are doing if they want to harmonize.

Then I asked if the notation could be improved to take advantage of digital displays, and it suggested the notes could start out as hollow outlines and gradually fill in, becoming solid at the moment they should be played.

It seems like regurgitation is pretty advanced these days :D

You asked it for a novel musical notation, and it gave you a riff on guitar hero and DDR and beat saber.

Not only that, but it wouldn't really work well for music played by professionals. Putting multiple parts together is reducing how easy it is to distinguish your part, compared to the norm where you JUST have your part, and adding color to the party doesn't get you back that level of being able to distinguish your part, and might even require different parts of your brain get involved.

It sounds exactly like the kind of thing a stoner comes up with and crows about before they sober up and realize "no wait, that wasn't really a good idea and I know nothing about the relevant domain". No wonder these chat bots are so popular on HN

> You asked it for a novel musical notation, and it gave you

Newp - I asked it for "a visually unusual musical notation that isn't just adding extra markup to traditional staff notation", or words to that effect, and it suggested something that met all the requirements I gave it. If you want to add more requirements you need to tell the chatbot, not me.

I'm baffled how people are so amazed by easily-found existing ideas being presented by an arrogant chatbot.
BTW, that will be very counterintuitive for a performing player, because a performing musician will look both ahead and behind during performances. Adding more dynamism to an already stressful real-time flow is not good.

How do I know? I’m a double bass player.

It was an example of GPT offering a notation unrelated to anything mentioned in the prompt. I wasn't suggesting we all adopt it as our new notation.

This whole comment page feels like a chain of "it clearly can't do X" -> "it does X" -> "no obviously it does X but it can't do Y", spread among several threads and repeated over and over.

I've tried this out. It doesn't seem to matter how you phrase your request for "alternative music notation", it suggests colouring it in. Which is very easily found on a Wikipedia page describing an existing system used to teach music, as well as many other pages on the topic.
It runs on the inputs you give it, not the ones inside your head. If you don't specify what kind of notation you want, then colored-in notes is a perfectly reasonable notation for it to suggest. If you want something else, you can literally type "Give me another idea that isn't related to color" into the input box.