chorAIles
Fast-forward to now, and there is something else I want to learn. Given all the hype and hubbub about contemporary AI tools, I thought it might be a good idea to find a way to use them. I didn't want to do the "make a song sounding like Mozart with a techno bass line", because it doesn't really strike my creative fancy. Instead, I was thinking about my old "ambient Bach" pieces, and I thought that I could try the same approach but let AI construct the 4-voice chorales.
So I fired up ChatGPT and typed "write a 4-voice chorale, 16 measures long, using 16th century counterpoint". The results were predictably... strange... but there was an interesting quality to the AI output. I tweaked it a bit more ("don't use so much parallelism" [it never stopped really], "use a different soprano line" [initially they were all the same]), and I chose four to realize using my modular synth gear. Long and 'ambient', of course!
The above four pieces I selected from about 10 works that ChatGPT wrote.
The last one is intruguing. I'm not sure what
triggered it, but the AI algorithm simply wrote the same 3-chord
sequence over and over. I guess it got tired and lazy? I kind-of
like it.
Brad Garton
March, 2025