I guess it’s in our nature to want to push the limits of a new technology as soon as it’s available. As soon as GPT-4 came out, I mostly wanted to ask it about stuff it didn’t know. I had a bunch of problems with hallucinations and even emailed a professor to ask him for a copy of a paper that didn’t actually exist. So now having the option to upload PDFs to it and ask questions about them is great. Ideas abound. Explain to me like I’m 5, these research papers from a wide array of different disciplines I have an interest but no expertise in. Exciting!
The thing I’d always wanted GPT-4 to know more about is Tidalcycles live-coding language (plus MaxMsp / Gen~) so now with custom GPTs being available as of this week, the first thing I did was make Tidalcycles GPT. First, I saved all the Docs off the Tidalcycles website as PDF and combined them into a couple of files, then uploaded them as context. Result – a version of ChatGPT that knows quite a lot about Tidalcycles. Should be at least as useful as the Docs for people who want to know how to do something. But also pretty interesting because it’s pretty good at writing music using Tidalcycles too. It already knows a fair bit about the structure of music so I managed to get it to write me a techno track using Tidalcycles and the code worked straight away.
So, the interesting thing for me here is the emerging capability of GPT to write music of its own. I’ve seen musicGen and some of the other generative audio models and they’re very impressive. But this is different, the model has a lot of freedom over what it makes. I gave it some prompts like “express the feelings of your true soul”, and that kind of thing and the results were really interesting. I’m not really aware of any other means by which ChatGPT can write music (maybe I’m missing something) so it’s cool that by having access to the Tidalcycles Docs, it now does. I’m probably not going to use this to write an album, although someone could I guess, but it gives an interesting foresight into what this technology will be able to do in the future when it has access to multiple means to make music and some experience writing it.
I’m pretty excited to see the aspects of human creativity that are unlocked when machines are able to perform a lot of the tasks that we deeply engage with creatively now. I don’t believe for a second that artists will be satisfied to just do the same things but faster. I guess we’ll find out very soon.