Music Meets Technology: Enhancing Student Learning with ChatGPT and AI

There’s so much talk about AI and specifically, ChatGPT, and its impact on student learning. Whether you approve of it or not, AI technology is here to stay and will only become more advanced. How can we learn to embrace it and utilize its powers to further engage our students in the classroom and better prepare them for the world that lies ahead?

If you haven’t yet heard of ChatGPT, it’s a chatbot powered by AI. You can ask it any number of questions and it will return a unique response, even if you ask it the same question twice. The fear from educators is that students will submit reports for assignments without any personal insight or contribution. So what does this mean for music educators?

The options for how to use AI are evolving, similar to the ways in which we teach concepts to students are always evolving. Here are some examples for ways in which Chat GPT can support music educators:

• Composition and Songwriting Assistance: Ask ChatGPT to help with song composition and provide suggestions for chord progressions, melodies, and instrumentation as a starting point. You can also use this same method to generate basic lyrics to which students can modify or add personal experiences. (See example at the bottom.)
• Music History: ChatGPT can provide short summaries of historical music events that are relevant to the section you’re currently studying. Do they want to know how music became digital? Do they know what the term “analog” even means? Yes, you can also use the tool to explore history that predates their parents’ age, like, “Did Beethoven and Mozart ever meet?”
• Music As a Universal Language: We talked about the universality of music in our last blog post, and ChatGPT can help us better understand music as it relates to other cultures on a global scale. Use the technology to translate the lyrics of a Hungarian folk song and compare it to US bluegrass and blues lyrics.

Don’t take our word for it though. We asked 2018 GRAMMY Music Educator Award winner and Global Teacher Prize Top 10 finalist, Melissa Salguero in the Bronx, NY what she thought about it all.

“As a music teacher, I have found ChatGPT to be an incredibly useful tool in my classroom. It has allowed me to easily create quizzes and exercises for my students who come in every day at various levels, saving me a significant amount of time and energy. Additionally, it has been an invaluable tool for organizing and planning my unit plans and curriculum maps.”

We hope this inspires you to experiment with the tool with an open mind to see how it can help you innovate and engage your students at every level. There has been a lot of skepticism about if it can or will replace creativity and original music, but the power of music creation will always lie within the individual artist. While ChatGPT and other tools like it can help students learn how to better articulate their thoughts, songwriting that speaks true for the artist can never be replaced by AI.

Music creators dig deep into their experiences and use those to craft something that connects with an audience. It’s not about the correct words, it’s about sharing the human experience. As songwriter Nick Cave so aptly wrote in a recent post, “Songs arise out of suffering, by which I mean they are predicated upon the complex, internal human struggle of creation and, well, as far as I know, algorithms don’t feel. Data doesn’t suffer.”

Collectively, let’s look at this as another opportunity for us all to innovate and help students see how their unique perspectives can shape the future of music.

Just for fun, I asked ChatGPT to “explain music theory in a rap song,” and here’s its response. Let the discourse begin about how well you think it did:

Verse 1:
Listen up, I got a story to tell
About the theory that makes the music ring well
It’s not just about the beat and the flow
It’s about the chords and the notes that you know

Chorus:
It’s music theory, it’s music theory
It’s the foundation of the melody
It’s music theory, it’s music theory
It’s the key to making the harmony

Verse 2:
You got your scales, you got your keys
You gotta know them if you wanna please
The major, the minor, they got a different feel
But together they make a harmony, it’s real

Chorus:
It’s music theory, it’s music theory
It’s the foundation of the melody
It’s music theory, it’s music theory
It’s the key to making the harmony

Verse 3:
Chord progressions, they got a sequence
They take you on a journey, it’s so intense
The I-IV-V, it’s a classic move
It’s been used for decades, it’s got groove

Chorus:
It’s music theory, it’s music theory
It’s the foundation of the melody
It’s music theory, it’s music theory
It’s the key to making the harmony

Outro:
So don’t just focus on the lyrics and the beat
Take a deeper look, dig into the meat
Music theory is what makes the music sweet
So go ahead and give it a seat

Please note that this is a fictional rap song and the information provided might be basic and not an accurate representation of music theory as it’s a very broad and complex subject.

As they add in the final sentence disclaimer, it’s pretty basic, but it’s a jumping off point to engage students in a highly complex subject matter.

Feel free to let us know how you’ve found the tool helpful (or not!). As supporters of classroom innovation, we are eager to learn more about how it inspires educators to think differently about how they teach and engage their students.