With the advent of LLMs and AI wrappers, the barriers to entry in the world of technology are breaking. As Chamath put it, the future will not be governed by people who are good at memorizing things and manually doing laborious computations but rather by tastemakers.

Tastemakers know what they want because they've seen what they don't. Unfortunately, when money gets involved, sellouts become a problem. True tastemakers create trends and drive innovation by sticking to their tastes rather than catering to their corporate sponsors or audiences. In other words, the more personal something is, the more universal it is - and AI tools have the potential to push creative boundaries in ways that are not easy to imagine.

Notation Landscape

Dominant notation software like Sibelius is limited and static and requires meticulous attention to detail at every step of the process.

To substitute a Db Neopolitan 6 chord in first inversion across 18 instruments for the dominant chord in a symphonic score, the chord must be diagnosed, and each note must be inputted individually across the instruments. Editing this on paper is one thing, but doing it within a notation program is tiring and probably bad for your back. Keyboard shortcuts and MIDI input help, but we need more.

IMAGE: Db Neopolitan 6 chord in first inversion

With MusicIDE, the goal is to be able to prompt the system to do this in the same way that Cursor does—to generate and apply all the changes while giving me the option to further edit them before accepting them.

IMAGE: Cursor layout

This tool will know that you're in the key of C and will generate a Db chord with an F in the bass. To do that, it needs to understand what a Neopolitan chord is, what the six means, what the notes are in every key, and be able to substitute the current notes for the new ones across all the instruments.

Traditionalists will say this is blasphemy, and they have a point, but this isn't traditional music composition. Think of it as a parabolic extrapolation of the curated non-determinism that composers have used for over a century.

Generated Music?

Generated is the right word to use, although it's different from what's out there—like Suno, which will put most musicians to shame and potentially fill them with anger. It is what it is: use these tools or lose out. Record labels are doing the same thing; they're just less tech-savvy, so it's taking time, and there are legal hurdles. Suno doesn't seem to care about the legal hurdles.

MusicIDE is going to be much more than a generative AI wrapper. It's a power tool for composers and musicians that will feature exhaustive permutations of music concepts, references to historical examples of those concepts, and a way to learn music on the instrument of your choosing with the help of AR and guitar-hero-inspired visuals.

Eventually, it will be open source, with plugins for other use cases, such as virtual reality instrument training and robotic symphonies.

Applications

The overarching goal is to aid individuals in music research and composition by giving everyone the compositional and analytical tools that history's greatest musicologists, musicians, and composers have been working with.

Public access is not soon.