This week a lot of AI stuff happened (GPT-4 and Midjourney V5 got released), so I decided to figure out how to get comfortable with all that and how it might support me in my work.
A colleague of mine mentioned that he is using Chat GPT and GitHub Copilot as a learning tool to become a better programmer. This really inspired me and so I took some time to try if that is something that I could utilise as well.
So I opened a little project of mine and tried to rebuild it with the help of those tools.
Building a 3D sequencer in the browser
A few month ago I bought this three.js journey course by Bruno Simon, which really helped me to get started with this amazing library and to realise the possibilities of 3D in the browser.
While exploring the tool, I had the idea of building a little sequencer, where you can place cubes next to each other and, depending on their position, it would play a different note. This note should always be part of a scale I could select before.
To accomplish this I decided to use the following things:
Three.js - For building and rendering the 3D scene
Tonal.js - For musical tasks, like creating scales and converting midi notes to frequency
WebAudio API - For sound synthesis in the browser
Vite.js - for tooling
My Approach to AI Tools
To work on that I used Chat GPT and GitHub Copilot. I did not have a specific approach while I used these tools. But looking back at what I did, there were two broad categories of interaction:
Asking for suggestions
coming up with the architecture of the program
suggesting functions that could be in there
asking how to build a sequencer that does certain things
Using it as a reviewer and guide
posting code that was not working and asking what’s wrong with it
giving it working code and asking to optimise it
asking questing about specific parts of suggested code and to explain it
This all worked surprisingly well for me, and I really learned a lot by this kind of interaction.
Especially as a beginner, there is so much terminology that I didn’t know about, which made it really hard to ask for questions in a traditional environment. But there I could ask in plain English and it would nudge me in the right direction.
The outcome
I managed to build a basic version of this sequencer in a relative short amount of time. It has the following features:
Add new steps by placing cubes next to an existing one
Creating steps based on the position that contain note information related to the scale that is selected
Playing the sequencer by running through each cube in the order it was placed
Making some sound based in the note that is stored for each step
This is just the basic of it, but I quite like that.
Conclusion
In my opinion those AI Tools can really support you in learning to code and also in getting your ideas to a working thing much faster. This is a real game changer for me, since I do not have to spend a long time learning the syntax of a new language, but can start right away.
I am well aware that AI is heavily biased and there is a lot of work to do in terms of misinformation and just wrong stuff. But for me it is important to use those tools and see how they impact my life as a creative. And if they replace me, or elevate me to the next level. While the later is something I see great potential in.
Other things I did this week
Animations
Drawing
That’s it for this week. Hope you liked it.