for mixed voices (SATB div) & piano
Text: English (GPT-3 & Ed Newton-Rex)
Duration: c16 minutes
Difficulty: 4/5

Composer's note
Upon discovering GPT-3, an early artificial intelligence text-generation system created by OpenAI, I was curious to see whether I could use it to write a text to set to music. I typed out a starting phrase, ‘Below is a poem about music and solitude’, and hit Enter. It began, ‘I stand in the library where a voice soars,’ and continued for a few lines before abruptly stopping. I kept pressing Continue, occasionally deleting a line and requesting a replacement, and before long had eight stanzas’ worth, which I took as my text.

The mention of the piano in the first stanza inspired my choice of instrumentation, and the descending eight-note opening piano figure is meant to suggest the half-remembered sound of the piano referenced by the ‘author’. The overall structure of the piece is loosely modelled on Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, because the oddities of the text, particularly the final stanza, reminded me of Christopher Smart’s poem.

It remains to be seen how AI will be adopted in the creative arts, and what its impact will be. Composing this piece, I found that it can at least be a valuable source of inspiration, providing new material to work with that in turn inspires ideas of your own.

Ed Newton-Rex
Ed’s musical education began when he was a chorister in the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, where he later returned as a choral scholar. He has written for a number of groups, including The King’s Singers, VOCES8, and The Thirteen, and for performances including the BBC Radio 3 broadcast from the Edington Festival. He has also worked extensively in music technology: he founded an AI music composition company that was acquired by ByteDance, and since then has worked on music technology at TikTok and Snapchat, as well as co-founding the AI Song Contest. He lives in California and is a mentor at Abbey Road Studios in London.