Teaching an AI to compose: how this listening experiment began
By Yuval Shay-El Can you teach an AI program to compose music by treating it like a human student? That question was the starting point for this project. I began working with ChatGPT as a composition teacher might work with a student: introducing a musical language, setting exercises, discussing the results, and asking for corrections and revisions. The aim was to compose music in standard notation, intended for a human musician to perform. The recordings let us hear realizations of those scores. A shared musical starting point The framework comes from the experimental dodecaphonic approach developed by the composer and music theorist Zvi Harry Nadel (1908–1987) . It should not be confused with Schoenberg’s twelve-tone method, although there are aesthetic affinities. Nadel’s approach also forms part of my own history as a composer. The human pieces in the listening experiment were my first compositions, written while I was studying with Nadel. They were recently brought together...