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Comment by fenomas | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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