We would like to thank Omar Roy for this insightful article on artificial intelligence and its use in the piano studio. Want to learn more about artificial intelligence? Check out the latest issue of Piano Magazine. Our new summer issue can be found by clicking here.
In recent years, the proliferation of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has simultaneously caused both awe and controversy. Many express curiosity regarding how it works, what its limitations are, and how it might be used for their benefit. However, AI is not a new phenomenon and has been around for decades, with its development beginning as early as the 1940s and 1950s, most notably with the work of Alan Turing.1 On a more sophisticated scale, OpenAI’s “ChatGPT” has become almost ubiquitous with the term “AI,” though it is only one example of the extent to which AI has been developed. But what exactly is ChatGPT, and why is it so popular?
ChatGPT is a Generative AI (GenAI) constructed around a Large Language Model (LLM). According to Microsoft, a large language model is “a type of AI that can process and produce natural language text. It learns from…text data such as books, articles, and web pages to discover patterns and rules of language from them.”2 Whenever you send a text message, you’ll see predictive text suggestions to complete your message—that’s an LLM at work. ChatGPT happens to be one of the most comprehensive and most widely known. With the right prompts, ChatGPT can generate content that is surprisingly sophisticated, making it a powerful tool in the right hands.
ChatGPT and the Independent Piano Teacher
While much effort is being channeled into uncovering the latent possibilities for AI as a pedagogical aid, the use of AI in business-related administrative tasks is well documented.
Within the independent piano studio, teachers often act in other capacities. These include the roles of business owner, manager, customer service representative, and event planner, to name a few. Each of these roles is often laden with administrative responsibilities that can be time consuming. While there exists software to address many of the tasks that teachers may run into, some teachers may not yet have a large enough studio, or the revenue, to justify a subscription to a studio management system. In this article, we’ll explore a few examples of common tasks and how teachers can leverage ChatGPT to accomplish those tasks more efficiently.3
Remember, tools like ChatGPT
are LLMs – Large Language Models,
not creative thinkers or researchers.
Entering the AI Playground
Scheduling, for example, can be an extremely time-consuming task without the aid of some sort of scheduling software. ChatGPT makes swift work of collating multiple availabilities into a single schedule in mere seconds. Simply copying and pasting the various availabilities into the prompt area and asking ChatGPT to assign times based on mutual availability yielded the following result.
You:
Compile the following schedules of availability so that each person gets a single 1-hour meeting with me on either Monday or Tuesday between the hours of 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM. People may not share the same time with each other.
Michael: Monday 9:00am-12:00pm, 1:00pm to 2:00pm, 3:30pm – 4:30pm; Tuesday 12:00-1:00pm, 2:00pm-3:30pm
Vivek: Monday 9:00am-10:00am, 1:00pm to 2:00pm, 3:00pm – 4:30pm; Tuesday 12:00-1:00pm, 2:30pm-4:30pm
Xiaohan: Monday 10:00am-12:00pm, 1:00pm to 2:30pm, 3:30pm – 5:00pm; Tuesday 11:00am-1:00pm, 1:30pm-3:30pm
Stephanie: Monday 10:30am-12:00pm, 1:30pm to 3:00pm, 3:30pm – 4:30pm; Tuesday 12:00-1:00pm, 2:00pm-3:30pm
ChatGPT:
Here’s the compiled schedule with each person having a single 1-hour meeting with you on either Monday or Tuesday between 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and ensuring that no two people share the same time slot:
- Michael: Monday 9:00am – 10:00am
- Vivek: Monday 10:00am – 11:00am
- Xiaohan: Monday 11:00am – 12:00pm
- Stephanie: Monday 1:30pm – 2:30pm
All meetings are scheduled for 1 hour within your specified time frame, and each person has a unique time slot.
While this example involves only four students, it’s quite easy to scale this to larger numbers—if you have everything organized in a spreadsheet, you can even copy and paste the entire spreadsheet into the prompt box. Note that the current free version of ChatGPT (GPT 3.5) no longer supports document upload, so users must upgrade to the paid version (GPT 4.0) in order to access those features.
We hope you enjoyed this excerpt from Omar Roy’s article “Leveraging Artificial Intelligence in the Piano Studio.” To read the full article, please click here.
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NOTES
- Harvard Medical School. “A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence.” Harvard University. Last modified September 28, 2017. sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2017/history-artificial-intelligence/.
- Microsoft. “Workshop: Interact with OpenAI Models.” Microsoft. microsoft.github.io/Workshop-Interact-with-OpenAI-models/llms/.
- OpenAI. “ChatGPT: Conversational AI developed by OpenAI.” OpenAI. openai.com/chatgpt.