10th May: Music is hard for humans and AI

A chinchilla playing a guitar, thanks Midjourney!

Hello all! One day late, as it was a public holiday in Berlin yesterday, the rather curious “Herren tag” (Father’s Day), where groups of men go out and get drunk… 🤷♂️. It’s also Ascension Day if you’re into that sort of thing.

It’s a small newsletter this week, and mostly about music.

Enjoy, and if you enjoy what you read, find ways to support me on my website. 💯

Podcast version

Listen to a podcast version of this newsletter on this page, or search for “Chinchilla Squeaks” wherever you get podcasts.

Can AI read and create sheet music?

Notation generated with AI by the article author

Sparked by this post and my recent explorations with OCR and sheet music, I came across this interesting article. Despite advancements in tools like ChatGPT4, the nuances of musical notation, such as tempo and dynamics, remain elusive to artificial intelligence. While AI tools like GPT 4 Vision and Anthropix Claude 3 Opus try to decode and analyse musical cues, they struggle with identifying popular music and grasping fundamental music theory concepts like key signatures and time signatures. Considering music…