{"id":30427,"date":"2025-10-15T18:07:07","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:07:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/?p=30427"},"modified":"2025-10-15T18:11:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T22:11:19","slug":"using-ai-to-think-like-a-harpist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/using-ai-to-think-like-a-harpist\/","title":{"rendered":"Using AI to Think Like a Harpist"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>As a clarinetist, I have spent much of my career interpreting music rather than arranging it. My instinct when adapting music from, say, a piano solo, to an ensemble piece (such as the <em>Danzas Tristes Espa\u00f1olas<\/em> by V\u00edctor Carbajo, I&#8217;m currently revising for clarinet, cello, and harp) has previously been a matter of simply assigning notes from the original to the parts and hoping each player can work out exactly how it&#8217;s going to be played on their individual instrument. That&#8217;s how I&#8217;ve always done it, and it&#8217;s worked fine. Until now. Now, working with AI has changed that dynamic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Just as letting AI write a story for me would take all the fun and creativity out of the process, I would never dream of letting AI transcribe the music for me. But, what I found was that by letting the AI act as a companion in the arranging process, it helped me understand better how to write idiomatically for harp and cello. Together, my AI friend and I went line by line through the score, finding ways to translate a dense piano texture into a clear, idiomatic trio for clarinet, cello, and harp.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>For example, midway through the arranging process, I realised that the sound I wanted was more percussive than the piano score revealed. I wanted the music to have the flair of flamenco guitar. Just transcribing the notes and markings given in the original was just not going to be good enough. That&#8217;s when I turned to my little AI friend:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul>\n<li>I wanted the harp to sound very dry, so I learned that adding <em>\u00e9touff\u00e9<\/em> would imitate the short, damped resonance of guitar strings.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>I also verified that changing the beaming of chords would induce the harpist to alternate hands. For safe measure, I added &#8220;LH-RH&#8221; to drive home the idea.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>To ensure an equally flamenco effect was given to the cello, I added <em>sul tasto pizz. secco (quasi chitarra)<\/em> for the cello to achieve a rounded, percussive tone closer to a mariachi guitarr\u00f3n (rather than a <em>sul ponticello<\/em> effect, which is more brittle).<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>For the clarinet part, I re-beamed the melody to show its rhythmic vitality implied by the <em>hemiola<\/em> in the original.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p>Rather than taking creativity away, AI actually expanded it. It allowed me to access levels of creativity I would not normally afford myself, <em>short of taking an orchestration course<\/em>, that is. Instead, this process let me bring in exactly the tools I needed when I needed them, and my musical background gave me the instincts to know which tools to reach for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>How working with AI taught me to think like a harpist and a cellist while arranging V\u00edctor Carbajo\u2019s \u201cDanzas Tristes Espa\u00f1olas\u201d for clarinet, cello, and harp \u2014 exploring techniques such as \u00e9touff\u00e9 and sul tasto pizzicato to capture a Spanish guitar-inspired sound.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30433,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[21,6,41],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30427"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30427"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30436,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30427\/revisions\/30436"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/jasonhall.ca\/music\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}