It’s snowing outside. I decide to listen to A Charlie Brown Christmas. A bit early, but still: snow!

At the same time, I’m playing with GPT-3’s new text-davinci-003 model. It’s impressive.

A couple weeks ago, Adam and I tried to get GPT-3 to spit out chord progressions. Today’s updated GPT-3 seems pretty good: sure, some of my prompts result in sonic (or textual) mayhem, but many more result in ii-V-I and other legible changes.

I punch in an oddball prompt:

Give me the chords to a straight-ahead jazz reharmonization of Erik Satie's Gymnopedie No. 1. A simple list will do.

GPT-3 replies:

Ebmaj7 - Bbmaj7 - Ebmaj7 - Bbmaj7 - Cm7 - Fm7 - Gm7 - Bb7 - Eb7 - F7

Okay, those first repeating chords make some sense; I can tack a melody to that. The next are a bit mysterious, but I give it a go and eventually find a way to make them fit. I toy with chromatic approaches while Vince Guaraldi sinks in and somehow end up with… well, “Gymnopedie No. GPT-3” I suppose.