From original text to music

ChatGPT is a large language model or LLM which is freely assessable online and also through paid subscription. When people talk about artificial intelligence or AI typically they are talking about ChatGPT or some other LLM. Basically it’s a really sophisticated “chatbot” that essentially does something similar to the text prediction function on your phone. The difference is the LLM can produce large blocks of text and synthesize large blocks of content making it especially useful for creative projects like this. I use a paid version of ChatGPT to help with learning, planning and lyric writing. In a later post I’ll detail the process I go through which is easily replicated with the tool. The paid version of ChatGPT is important to ensure better responses. Think of ChatGPT as like a smart but imperfect companion in the journey who acts as a consultant and creative assistant. And you may need to replace your assistant if they are behaving bad.

Suno is an artificial music generator tool which can produce very polished music. I use this tool once I nail down lyrics for songs to produce the songs. In a later blog post I’ll share how I do this and the process I use. For publishing music on the internet commercially on streaming platforms like YouTube Music, Spotify and Apple Music it’s necessary to utilize Suno’s paid subscription because it issues a commercial license and allows for downloading songs to publish on platforms. Think of Suno like a helpful music production studio who helps bring your musical ideas to life.

For any project involving ancient authors it’s important to utilize original language versions of their texts as much as possible. This ensures that your interacting with the text as close to possible to how it was written by the original author. I primarily utilize a very old edition of the Latin Fathers produce by Jacobus Paulus Migne who lived in the 1800s. Jacobus was a scholarly rock star of 1800s scholarship who put together a massive volume containing the writings of many ancient authors. Primarily I’m working out of Volume 32 of his Patrologia Latina. Personally I don’t speak or read Latin but with the use of AI tools like ChatGPT it’s possible to easily access and read these texts via translation into modern English. Just always make sure to double check things!! LLMs are a lot like our brains, they are imperfect and so we always need to carefully double check things.