Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists

The music notation tool space is balkanized in a variety of ways. One of the key splits is between standard music notation and tablature, which is used for guitar and a few other instruments. People are generally on one side or another, and the notation is not even fully compatible - tablature covers information that standard notation doesn't, and vice versa. This covers fingering, articulations, "step on fuzz pedal now," that sort of thing.

The users are different, the music that is notated is different, and for the most part if you are on one side, you don't feel the need to cross over. Multiple efforts have been made (MusicXML, etc.) to unify these two worlds into a superset of information. But the camps are still different.

So what ChatGPT did is actually very interesting. It hallucinated a world in which tab readers would want to use Soundslice. But, largely, my guess is they probably don't....today. In a future world, they might? Especially if Soundslice then enables additional features that make tab readers get more out of the result.

I don't fully understand your comment, but Soundslice has had first-class support for tablature for more than 10 years now. There's an excellent built-in tab editor, plus importers for various formats. It's just the ASCII tab support that's new.

I wonder if LLMs will stimulate ASCII formats for more things, and whether we should design software in general to be more textual in order to work better with LLMs.

I’m not super familiar with Soundslice. But all the tab users I know use guitar pro or maybe ultimate guitar, and none of them can read standard notation on its own. Does Soundslice have a lot of tab-first users?

Yes, Soundslice has a ton of tab-first users. And in fact the primary reason I founded the site was to scratch my own itch of being able to create tab that's synced with real audio recordings. (I'm a guitarist myself.)

When I read the blog post, I thought it was saying that Soundslice didn't have any tab support.

The comparison of "we expect this (classical notation screenshot) but instead got this (ascii tab screenshot)" made me think that the only thing Soundslice supported was classical notation.

Definitely a subtle distinction there. Soundslice supports tab in many formats (MusicXML, Guitar Pro, PowerTab, TuxGuitar, PDF/images of published tab, or tab notated directly in the Soundslice editor) but didn't support ASCII format yet.

I've had AI create ascii-art (Nethack-style) dungeon diagrams when I asked it to write me a D&D adventure. Last time I tried it these dungeon diagrams were completely nonsensical, but that was a few years ago.

I think ASCII art in particular is generally a weak point for LLMs; maybe they could do better if they used an image model. Other ASCII syntaxes using matched { } delimiters seem like they would be easier.