Yo-Yo Ma vs. ChatGPT in question answering

"Music is a mode of transportation."

Introduction

ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by OpenAI has been blowing up since its launch date in November 2022. It gives clear answers to human prompts in a conversational way. There are some stunning capabilities of ChatGPT: intuitive question answering, writing a poem, reviewing code, and even allowing users to provide follow-up corrections… There have been a lot of exciting screenshots showing how well ChatGPT can do and the discussion of its technical details, product ideas, and prototypes are all over the place.

I’ve tried a couple of chats with ChatGPT and I’ve always wanted to write something about ChatGPT from a personal angle. A few days ago, I watched an interview on Youtube called “Yo-Yo Ma Answers Cello Questions From Twitter”. This video touched my heart deeply. As a cello learner, I resonate a lot with his very well-said words and am truly thankful that the abstract feeling of how music touches the hearts of people can be so tangibly expressed. Yo-Yo Ma is not only one of the greatest cellists in the world but also an excellent musical educator, an eloquent musician, and a great human being. Highly recommend everyone to watch it (and you will know what I mean)!

The questions given to Yo-Yo Ma are also short and clear prompts. The questions are asked on Twitter in short text forms by a variety of groups of people: people who don't know how to play the cello, people who know the cello pretty well, and people who appreciate music played on the cello. I wonder what would ChatGPT reply vs. the most experienced cellist in the world. Would it give me similar answers or even better ones?

Group 1: straightforward questions

1. Why are cellos so expensive?

   1. ChatGPT:

      

   2. Yo-Yo Ma:

      1. It depends on who, how, and when it was made. It takes strength, time, and expertise. A lot of modern makers use maple (back) and spruce (front). The harder maple bounces the sound back better.

2. Why are cellos so hard to tune?

   1. ChatGPT:

      

   2. Yo-Yo Ma:

      1. Cellos are hard to tune if you use the BIG pegs. But there are fine tuners that are much more subtle. I play out of tune anyway so if I tune and if it’s in tune it gives me less of an excuse.

3. What does vibrato mean?

   1. ChatGPT:

      

   2. Yo-Yo Ma:

      1. The vibrato varies. It’s like a sine wave. With lower strings, the vibrato is wider. With higher strings, it’s tighter. It’s sort of like focusing a light beam with a laser. All these allow you to choose what type of expression you want.

4. How the hell do cello players differentiate the frets?

   1. ChatGPT:

      

   2. Yo-Yo Ma:

      1. Guess what? There are no frets! For YEARS my fingers have had to figure out where they need to be in order to get the right sounds out.

From the examples above, you can tell that ChatGPT is really good at interpreting the questions and answering clear and defined questions, and even to questions with some natural verbal fillings like “how the hell”.

For some questions, it even does better than humans. In the question that “Why are cellos so expensive?”, besides material and craftsmanship, rarity, it even provides one more aspect: demand. From the material aspect, Yo-Yo Ma just said “A lot of modern makers use maple (back) and spruce (front). The harder maple bounces the sound back better.” But this doesn’t really answer why cello is expensive. Are maple and spruce hard to find or are they hard to maintain?

It could be true that Yo-Yo Ma is limited by the words limit on Twitter (in the video, the answer was also given with the play on the cello itself), but I would still give ChatGPT a 100/100 score and would say that it outperforms human with its complete, structural and logical answer. The only part that could be improved on is that it doesn’t have a taste of humor you can sense from Yo-Yo Ma’s answers.

Group 2: broad questions

1. Is the cello hard to learn?

   1. ChatGPT:

      

   2. Yo-Yo Ma:

      1. Cello is not hard to learn. The most important thing is about pulling and pushing the bow, making sure that you find the right spot in the string. If it gives you pleasure, if learning gives you pleasure and you can get pleasure from the physical sound, the vibrations of it, you can progress. If you say it’s really hard to learn and it’s difficult, and you are all tight and trying to make it happen and then it will be hard. So it really depends on your attitude and how resilient you are to figure out what you need to do to create a sound that’s pleasing.

I put this question into the category of “broad” because learning is an individual process that takes too many factors. Those questions are hard to answer even by humans.

If you look at the ChatGPT’s answer, it’s totally flawless. It breaks down the answers into three parts: why playing cello could be hard, how to progress, and what can be achieved. However, it sounds not very connected. Just like someone who is preaching the cliche that’s known to everyone. Also, the answer seems to work with another instrument. So I tried asking the same question but replacing the cello with piano to ChatGPT. Guess what?

The answer uses the same pattern but fills the contents with the facts of the piano. The second graph even looks exactly the same. We all know that learning another instrument could be similar but what makes piano learning different than cello learning then? As a person who plays both the piano and cello, I could tell that those two instruments are totally different. Other than their physical features, the key difference is, you can control the vibration of the sound with a cello, but not with a piano. In other words, an extra tonalization is added to the cello, and to all other string instruments as well. And just knowing the cello is “a large instrument”, “complex fingerboard”, and “four strings” doesn’t help me understand why exactly it is hard. How hard is it compared to an instrument that has “88 keys”?

With that, I asked one more question to ChatGPT: is the cello harder to learn than the piano?

This is a more straightforward prompt, and not surprisingly it is just listing the facts of the two instruments, sounding like a person who doesn’t know how to play either of them.

And let’s go back to Yo-Yo Ma’s answer. If you analyze it carefully, you’ll find that it also answers the question in a pattern matching what ChatGPT uses: why playing cello could be hard, how to progress, and what can be achieved. Why playing cello could be hard: “pulling and pushing the bow”, “ finding the right spot in the string”; how to progress: “not holding tight”, “attitude…, resilient…”; what can be achieved: “a pleasing sound”, “that gives you pleasure”. You may question that, having a great attitude, being resilient, and making pleasing also sound answers to all other instruments. That could be right. But remember, it is the cello! Making the sound happen with an empty string is very hard already. It’s not like with the piano you can just press down a key. With cello, you really need to find the right spot for both the pitch and tone of it. Even for the exact same note, the vibration of it can be different, ending in all sorts of magical soundings. Some cellists really know how to push the limits of the strings to produce a pleasing sound.

The problem with ChatGPT is that it is only capable of listing out the facts but not able to distinguish, understand, and re-interpret them.

Group 3: questions with strong opinions

1. Why are cellos the most beautiful instrument?

   1. ChatGPT:

      

   2. Yo-Yo Ma:

      1. There is of course your opinion. I tried to tell the cellists, especially the young cellists between you and me that you know the cello is the most beautiful instrument, right? I love cellos. It’s an instrument that has a lot of versatility. I can play bass lines, melodic stuff, rhythmic groups, I can imitate vocal sounds… that’s why I love it. I can play a lot of different music on it and can EXPLORE a lot of different music with it.

2. Why do cellists play suite no.1 in every movie?

   1. ChatGPT:

      

   2. Yo-Yo Ma:

      1. I think that movement represents the infinitude of what we have in the natural world. You think of flow, water, sunlight sparking, leaves of trees on a fall day…  We all can imagine something that is both constant and always changing. This music helps set the tone in movies. That music can help get people to a certain state of mind.

3. How do cellists play the 6th Bach Cello suite without crying out for joy?

   1. ChatGPT:

      

   2. Yo-Yo Ma:

      1. I love that question because it is explosive, so full of energy and it just goes and goes and goes and never ends… And it’s more explosive and more celebratory and the sky is opened up. You are right, it is incredibly joyous and you can not play that music without being in the same state of mind. Maybe that’s why we love music, because it puts you in a different state of mind. That makes me feel that I’m floating somewhere up in the sky, in the clouds, soaring above the tree lines. It takes you places. Music is a mode of transportation. It takes us from one reality to another. The reason I’m not crying out of joy is because I’m hopefully crying out for joy through the sounds coming from the cello.

The questions selected in this category all have strong/biased opinions. And the first thing ChatGPT do is deny or correct the opinion in the question, like “there is not a definitive answer to the question”, “it is a comment misconception” and “it is generally not appropriate”. If I’m asking “why XXX is the best instrument”, I certainly want some agreement, encouragement, or statements from similar minds. And unfortunately, ChatGPT is not able to achieve that. Yo-Yo Ma knows those questions are with opinions too, but he is very good at sensing the real responses people are looking for from the questions.

And for the statement and perspective in the answer, ChatGPT is just making sense of the facts with basic logic and grammar like before. It is not capable of generating independent ideas at all. Nevertheless, there’s still a bonus point for ChatGPT. If you are careful enough, you’ll find out that in the question “how do cellists play the 6th Bach Cello suite without crying out for joy?” I had a typo as “trying out for joy”. And ChatGPT still gives out answers for “crying out for joy”, which is quite impressive.

You will need to listen to Bach Cello suite No.1 and No.6 to truly appreciate the answers for the 2nd and 3rd questions. The melodies are so beautiful, but it doesn’t tell you what to think of. You tell yourself. Everybody imagines different things from the music, just like a dialogue with the composer, joyous and graceful. Hearing Yo-Yo Ma’s responses is like having a fleeting peek at his mind, his dialogue with the composer, and what he is thinking of when playing the music. Music becomes alive and only becomes alive when someone plays it. I truly believe that he is crying out for joy in his heart.

They are no doubts coming out from a masterful mind! It is so timeless and feels refreshing when being read again and again.

Ending

Technology is evolving rapidly with smarter and smarter results. Impossibles are becoming possibles. If someone ever asked me, would AI replace human beings one day, and what are something that can not be achieved by AI? I will show them this interesting comparison and that’ll be my answer.