From original text to music

ChatGPT is a large language model, or LLM, which is freely accessible online and also through a paid subscription. When people talk about artificial intelligence, or AI, they are typically 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 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 badly.

Suno is an artificial music generator tool which can produce very polished music. I use this tool to produce the songs once I nail down their lyrics. In a later blog post I’ll share how I do this and the process I use. For publishing music commercially on internet 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 songs to be downloaded for publication on those platforms. Think of Suno as a helpful music production studio that 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 you’re interacting with the text as close as possible to how it was written by the original author. I primarily utilize a very old edition of the Latin Fathers produced 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.