The Choir Director Corner Podcast
The Choir Director Corner Podcast
094. AI for Choir Directors?
There’s been a lot in the news about AI recently, and more specifically, with ChatGPT. I myself have used ChatGPT for a number of things, for a number of purposes–usually as an assistant to bounce ideas off of, and to brainstorm ideas when my brain is fried. It certainly can be helpful in saving me time. But there are still a lot of issues with it--the information often isn't accurate, you don't know where the information is coming from, and it doesn't always apply directly to everything we do as choir directors.
But I have good news! In Episode 94 of the podcast, I’m sharing with you an AI resource made SPECIFICALLY for choir directors, which solves all of the challenges with other typical AI tools! With this tool, you will save hours and hours of time searching; you will get detailed, in-depth answers to your questions, and you will know EXACTLY who/where the information is coming from. I'm super excited to share this resource with you, as I believe it will be a game-changer for choir directors, and it's only going to get better!
For a video tutorial, head on over to: choirdirectorcorner.com/hubtutorial
Looking for an online community of choir directors, just like you? Then you should really check out the Choir Director Corner Community Membership! Inside the membership there are Online Courses, a Resource Library with over 50 PDF's and Google Docs, and "Monthly Missions" Trainings where we focus on a specific topic, and you can ask questions and get feedback on how to tackle your biggest teaching challenges. And, as a member, you'll get instant access to the resource discussed in today's episode!
And now, when you sign up for the annual option, you'll get two months free: 12 months access for the price of 10!
Leading a choir doesn't have to be a DIY endeavor--it's better when it's done together! Come join an awesome online community of choir directors just like you over at:
choirdirectorcorner.com/membership
was just over a year ago and chat GPT was born, and I've dabbled a little bit in chat GPT and doing some of the tasks in my various workflows, and I've talked to other Choir Directors that have started to dabble in it as well. But did you know that there is another AI tool out there that is made specifically for Choir Directors? On today's episode of the podcast, I'm going to share that resource with you and also tell you how you can get access. Let's dive in. Here we go hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. Okay, hey, hey, hey, hey, what's up guys? Welcome and thank you so much for joining us today, and with that my name is used, it sort of as a virtual assistant to kind of bounce ideas off of and maybe help me brainstorm some ideas. When my brain is fried, which you know as a teacher, that can help happen quite a bit. It certainly can help in saving me time when I do use chat GPT and certainly in some cases, keeps me from spending hours and hours searching for something online. There are a lot of benefits to using it. It helps you to automate some repetitive tasks that you might have in your workflows, as I mentioned, helpful for really any type of brainstorming. One of the positives that it accumulates vast amounts of data and information very quickly, and so that's one of the things where it can really help as far as saving you time. It is very, I would say, human like in its responses. So, again, you know it's not perfectly human, it's not like being able to talk to one of my colleagues or one of the members of our choir director corner community membership, but it's getting close and it's getting closer every day. There are some forms of AI and chat GPT that can now generate images, which is kind of a cool thing, and the other thing too is that you know, as it's gathering more and more information, it's going to continue to get better and it really has improved leaps and bounds in a short amount of time.
Speaker 1:But I have noticed that there are a number of issues when it comes to using AI, and I've used chat GPT probably the most out of any of the other AI tools out there, but they all kind of fall under the same umbrella and many of them have a lot of these same issues. So there tends to be a little bit of a lack of common sense and also, it tends, you know, the responses that you get back often will lack context, because even with all the information that it can gather there, there still seems to be a lack of background information, just that lack of experience. In many cases, there's a lack of creativity. Some of the information is very general, so you're not getting a lot of in depth information. I've also gotten responses that you know talk about responses that are lacking something. I've gotten responses that are just flat out wrong factually, and so that's still a big problem with a lot of these AI tools. As you might imagine, there's, you know, a lack of empathy and emotional intelligence, because it's not a human. It's human like, but it's not like interacting with another considerate and kind human being. There seems to also be a difficulty with specialized topics, and I hear other people in other realms, other professions, that say this same thing. When you're getting into really specialized topics, it sort of struggles to keep up and, as you might imagine, there's some bias and there's some prejudice in some of these responses that you're getting, because what is it doing? Well, it's taking all of this information that it can find online, and oftentimes it's taking those places from different pieces of content, different origins of content, that already have their own biases and prejudices, like it or not, and so that then is showing up in this information, in the responses that you're getting, and maybe one of the biggest problems is that you don't really know where the information is coming from. So it gets back to the accuracy part of this where, yes, it might save you time as far as searching for information, but you are also going to be spending some time fact checking this information that you are getting from whatever AI source you are using.
Speaker 1:I'll just one example of chat GBT, where I typed in a prompt a searching for winter choral repertoire and I gave it some parameters and some specifics. You know I'm looking for I was looking for my tenor bass choir, right, and so I was just looking for okay, it's a TTB or TBB ensemble. Here are some of the things that I'm looking for, some of the themes maybe that I would like the music to be related to, and I got back this list and I'm looking at this list, and the vast majority of the ideas that I got back were just flat out wrong Titles of pieces that were attributed to the wrong composer Composers where there was a piece listed but the title was wrong. Pieces that were just totally unrelated to the sort of the themes that I was looking for, that I had given to chat GBT, and even pieces that I got back where it was for the wrong voicing, even though I told it what voicing I wanted. And, again, I don't know where any of that information is coming from, where it's taking those ideas or those suggestions from. So there are some positives, but there are certainly some negatives with that.
Speaker 1:Now, in my work and sort of exploring different AI resources because I sort of tinkered with chat GPT and before I started with that, I did some research as far as the different AI tools that are out there and what I might start with, and noticing that there really isn't anything out there in this realm that would be specific to music education or to choir directors. Right, as maybe would be expected. Right, we might not be the top priority of the CEO of chat GPT, and that's okay. Right, their audience is a little bit different in who they are serving. But the good news is that today I am sharing with you an AI tool, an AI source, made specifically for Choir Directors, which was designed to solve all of those different challenges that I just listed with ChatGPT and some of these other AI tools, and the reason behind that, or one of the reasons behind that, is because, with this particular resource, you're going to know exactly where the information is coming from.
Speaker 1:So this tool is something that I have actually created, and this is the Choir Director Corner Searchy Hub, and so your first question is okay, well, matt, what is this thing that you are talking about that you have created? Well, I've created this in conjunction with an amazing piece of software called Searchy, and so Searchy is a software that allows you to organize and house vast amounts of digital content, so video, audio, digital documents, resources, etc. And one of the amazing things with this is that it makes all of your content searchable, so that you can go through and find exactly what you are looking for in a matter of seconds versus hours. It also has an AI search engine, a search bot, if you will, that uses all of the content that you have loaded into your Searchy Hub, uses all of that in its brain, so to speak, so that users can then go in and ask questions and get answers exactly when they need them. But, again, you know where that information is coming from because it's all drawn from and based from my content, and so you can have confidence that the answers that you are getting are reliable and they are, you know, have been successful in real life from my teaching experience and also grounded it grounded in pedagogy. So, through the power of the software folks at Searchy, I have created this hub that contains all of my video content, so several years worth of video content online courses, my workshops, trainings and more. The hub also contains all of my podcast episodes, so you get the audio as well, and so this adds more context and specialized knowledge, background information to this AI brain that you have access to inside of the Searchy Hub. I'm also going to be adding all of my PDF resources, giving this hub even more in depth information to pull from, and, just like other forms of AI, the more that I add information, more content into it, it's just going to keep getting smarter and better and better.
Speaker 1:So this Searchy Hub contains two powerful tools that I think you're going to find really valuable as a Choir Director. Number one it's that ability to search through all of my content at lightning speed. So I can't count how many times I have gone online into Google or YouTube or into social media groups with a question and I am just looking for information and hours and hours later I don't really have an answer, or maybe I do have some answers, but I haven't really vetted that information as to who or where it's coming from. So the Choir Director, corner Community Searchy Hub is going to provide you with not only with the answers to your questions, but it also is going to show you where that information is coming from the exact video, the exact podcast episode, the exact resource, the digital resource that that information is coming from. And then the second really powerful tool is this AI search engine, which is loaded again with all of my content into its brain, where you can go in at any time and ask questions, get the answers that you are searching for and then again it is showing you where it is pulling this information from. So if you need more context, you need more in depth information, you can go right into it and it provides it directly to you. So if it's, here are four videos that I'm pulling this information from. It lists those four videos and you can play them right away. You don't have to go digging for that information and, again, you know exactly where that information is coming from.
Speaker 1:So this hub serves all, solves all of the typical problems with AI. You can be sure that the information is pulled from a trusted resource and it's. You are provided with, not general information, but specialized, in depth information that all is coming from. The quote, unquote brain of a actual choir director is going to save you hours and hours of time searching for the tips, strategies, techniques and resources that you need in your everyday life as a choir director. And the other nice thing about this in both of these instances, when you, it is providing you with this information. It's providing you with the exact video, audio, digital resources.
Speaker 1:The other thing it has is a transcript tool. So how this works is, say, you've asked your question, maybe you're looking for physical warm ups, and so you put physical warm ups into the search and you get this, get the responses back, and then you see some videos there that have that are related to physical choir warm ups, and so you go into the first video and it's an hour and a half long, is one of my online trainings or one of the lessons from one of my courses and you're like Matt, I don't have an hour and a half, I just need a really quick answer. Well, what you can do is you can use the transcript tool and so it will show you all of the instances, with the timestamp, of where physical choir warm ups are mentioned, and so then you can scroll through and read through the different spots so you can find the exact things that you're looking for. So maybe there's a section of that video where I'm going through specific physical warm ups and I have listed five warm ups. Well, using the transcript, you can find that timestamp and fast forward to that exact spot in the video that's talking about the exact information that you need. So that's another really cool part of this software that I am super excited about.
Speaker 1:Well, hey, if you are ready for a tour of the Quadricorner Searchy Hub, good news. I have created a video that shows you the logistics of navigating the CDC Searchy Hub how to search and find the content you are looking for and also how to ask questions of the AI chat bot that is there. So you can find the tutorial video over at quadricornercom. Forward slash hub tutorial and that's all one word hub tutorial and I'll put that link in the show notes as well, and if this is something that you would think that you would benefit from having access to, the great thing is that I have just added this into my Quadricorner Community membership. It's at no added cost to my members, so my current members are not going to pay anything more than what they already do. This is just another resource that I'm adding into our membership, along with all the other resources that we have in there, so if you'd like to become a member again, you can head over to quadricornercom forward slash membership.
Speaker 1:Well, that is it for today's episode. My friends, I'm super excited about this new tool and taking AI and really putting it to use for choir directors, so that it is something that is very much geared towards what we do every single day, and again, I think this is really going to be a game changer, saving you hours and hours of time and getting you the detailed, specific information and answers that you need when you need them. Well, thanks so much for listening to this episode. My friends, until next time, keep being awesome. Are you looking for resources that will save you time and frustration? Want to dive deeper into topics related to your teaching? Then check out the choir director corner community membership over at choir director corner dot com. Forward slash membership.