Category: Faith

Songwriting in the A.I. Age

Posted on by chris

I’m a member of the 12 Song Challenge community, a bunch of people all over the world who help support each other in the art and craft of writing songs for use in our local churches. It’s run by the people at Resound Worship, and I’ve found it to be a wonderful source of inspiration, friendship, and challenge.

Literally a challenge. Each month a songwriting challenge is set, based on a broad theme such as “Songs from the book of Acts” or “Happy Songs”. In November 2024 we were challenged to write songs with the assistance of “Artificial Intelligence”.

Hmm.

I have two problems with this.

I Don’t Believe A.I. Means What You Think It Means

While there’s a lively ongoing debate about what Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) even is, the term is incredibly popular at the moment. However, half the words in it (i.e. “intelligence”) are – at best – misleading. A.I. proper covers a wide range of computer-based systems, but most of the time on The Internet people use it to refer to systems that generate stuff from prompts – images, text, audio, or even – as we shall see – music. My gut feeling is A.I. has become popular as a term because a more specific term – for example A.G.S.P.O. (“Artifical Generation of Statisically Probable Outcomes”) – isn’t as easy to say.

The Cloud Is On The Ground

Second, people interact with A.I. systems through websites, often whimsically designed. It’s fun! Easy! And all in The Cloud. Except the cloud isn’t some abstract idea. It is real data centres, running real computers, containing real graphics processors, which require real energy to run, and real water to cool. The explosion in the popularity of A.I. tools – so much so that GPU manufacturer Nvidea became the world’s most valuable company in June 2024.

This reality is a problem. First, there is the mining of materials to produce the chips needed. Secondly, the emissions produced during the manufacture of these chips. Third, the emissions produced by the data centres themselves while running A.I. workloads. And fourthly, the use of water to cool these cips which run very hot. All of that is a problem because at the time we need to drasically reduce manufacturing, consumption, and emissions to help limit the man-made rise in global temperatures, we’re running gleefully into an A.I. future. And for what? Will the price that future generations pay be considered worth it?

Gerry McGovern has been writing about this stuff for years.

So, what do we do?

There’s no putting the A.I. genie back in the bottle. As A.I. tools become more prevalent I hope that more efficient ways are found to generate the energy and perform the cooling required. But I’m not hopeful that will happen fast enough to make a difference to the rapidy rising global temperature.

As Gerry McGovern [almost] says: we don’t have an [energy] production problem, we have an [energy] consumption problem.

The A.I. Challenge

With all that said, I had a songwriting challenge to do. Rather than boycott the entire thing (which was an option I considered) I wanted to use A.I. but keep my use of it to a minimum. I’d heard before that these tools work best when incorporated as part of a human-driven workflow.

As I’ve always found lyrics more challenging than music, I thought I’d start there.

Using ChatGPT for lyrics

I had already decided I wanted to write a song about the wisdom of God being infinetely better than the wisdom of man. Partly because I wasn’t aware of any songs specifically about that, but mostly because I wanted to make a small protest. So my initial prompt for ChatGPT was:

Write a modern worship song about the wisdom of god compared with the wisdom of man. Include descriptions of wisdom as being a voice crying out. Include the idea of wisdom being patient and gentle.

The response from ChatGPT was predictably naff, but was a starting point:

Title: The Voice of Wisdom

Verse 1
In the stillness, I can hear,
A gentle whisper drawing near.
The wisdom of the world so loud,
But Yours, O Lord, it stands unbowed.

Chorus
Wisdom, crying out in the night,
Patient and gentle, guiding with light.
While the shadows of man may sway,
Your truth, O God, will lead the way.

Verse 2
In the clamor, I find my peace,
Your voice, my heart, it will release.
The fleeting thoughts of human pride,
Fade away when You abide.

Chorus
Wisdom, crying out in the night,
Patient and gentle, guiding with light.
While the shadows of man may sway,
Your truth, O God, will lead the way.

Bridge
So I’ll lean on Your understanding,
In the quiet, Your grace expanding.
Teach me patience, teach me grace,
To find my strength in Your embrace.

Chorus
Wisdom, crying out in the night,
Patient and gentle, guiding with light.
While the shadows of man may sway,
Your truth, O God, will lead the way.

Outro
In every choice, in every sigh,
I’ll follow Your voice, I’ll lift my eyes.
For the wisdom of man may come and go,
But Your steadfast love will always grow.

I felt it could do better, so said:

Amend the song to include references about God’s ways being higher than human ways, and his understanding far beyond ours. Use analogies from nature.

And I got this:

Title: The Voice of Wisdom

Verse 1
In the stillness, I can hear,
A gentle whisper drawing near.
The wisdom of the world so loud,
But Yours, O Lord, it stands unbowed.

Chorus
Wisdom, crying out in the night,
Patient and gentle, guiding with light.
Your ways are higher, like mountains soar,
Your understanding opens every door.

Verse 2
In the clamor, I find my peace,
Your voice, my heart, it will release.
As rivers flow beneath the sky,
Your wisdom, Lord, will never die.

Chorus
Wisdom, crying out in the night,
Patient and gentle, guiding with light.
Your ways are higher, like mountains soar,
Your understanding opens every door.

Bridge
So I’ll lean on Your understanding,
In the quiet, Your grace expanding.
Teach me patience, teach me grace,
To find my strength in Your embrace.

Chorus
Wisdom, crying out in the night,
Patient and gentle, guiding with light.
Your ways are higher, like mountains soar,
Your understanding opens every door.

Outro
In every choice, in every sigh,
I’ll follow Your voice, I’ll lift my eyes.
For the wisdom of man may come and go,
But Your steadfast love will always grow.

OK, better, but not quite there yet. I wanted to make it sound a little less formal and hymn-like, as many modern worship songs have a more fluid syllable structure. So I said:

Make the number of syllables for each line in the verse different.

But ChatGPT seemed to latch on to “number of syllables” and added those to the end of each line while making minimal changes:

Title: The Voice of Wisdom

Verse 1
In the stillness, I can hear, (8)
A gentle whisper drawing near. (8)
The world’s loud wisdom, oh so proud, (9)
Yet Yours, O Lord, stands unbowed. (7)

Chorus
Wisdom, crying out in the night, (8)
Patient and gentle, guiding with light. (9)
Your ways are higher, like mountains soar, (9)
Your understanding opens every door. (9)

Verse 2
In the clamor, I find my peace, (8)
Your voice, my heart, it will release. (8)
As rivers flow beneath the sky, (8)
Your wisdom, Lord, will never die. (7)

Chorus
Wisdom, crying out in the night, (8)
Patient and gentle, guiding with light. (9)
Your ways are higher, like mountains soar, (9)
Your understanding opens every door. (9)

Bridge
So I’ll lean on Your understanding, (9)
In the quiet, Your grace expanding. (9)
Teach me patience, teach me grace, (8)
To find my strength in Your embrace. (8)

Chorus
Wisdom, crying out in the night, (8)
Patient and gentle, guiding with light. (9)
Your ways are higher, like mountains soar, (9)
Your understanding opens every door. (9)

Outro
In every choice, in every sigh, (8)
I’ll follow Your voice, I’ll lift my eyes. (9)
For the wisdom of man may come and go, (10)
But Your steadfast love will always grow. (9)

I tried a couple more times, but ChatGPT wasn’t going to improve this, and my A.I. prompt skills are minimal, so I took the lyrics above and used them as a starting point. These are the lyrics I actually wrote, you can see the similarities with what ChatGPT generated.

Verse 1
When the inner voice is loud
And vain desires are shouting out
I think that I can do it all myself
After striving to the end
I find I’m at the start again
I know I need your wisdom and your help

Chorus
Your wisdom is calling
Your wisdom will guide us
Your words like a friend who walks close beside us
Your ways are far higher
Your love beyond measure
We’ll trust in your goodness forever

Verse 2
In the stillness I can hear
A gentle whisper drawing near
It speaks of love too vast to comprehend
In Your mercy I find peace
Your grace will bring my soul release
You know me better than I know myself

Bridge
So I’ll lean on Your understanding
Your ways are higher than I could imagine
Teach me patience, teach me grace
Help me always walk your ways

These lyrics aren’t going to win any awards (I told you I wasn’t good at them) but I have to admit I wouldn’t have got this far so quickly without a kick-start by ChatGPT. So maybe that’s something I can use in the future.

Using Suno for music

One of the most astounding pieces of technology I saw this year was Suno. This A.I. tool takes prompts – you can select musical styles or other prompts, and optionally give it lyrics – and it will generate music, with vocals. The recording quality is pretty terrible, but you do get a fully-produced track. Guitars, drums, bass, keyboards, synths, melodic bits, vocal, the lot. Pretty incredible.

So, I posted my lyrics in, along with the prompt:

Contemporary worship, medium tempo, big build, compressed piano, toms, male vocal

And after a few seconds wait I got this:

Actually, I got two songs – Suno always gives you two options. This was the one I liked better, but interestingly, the verse sounds like it’s ripped off a song by David Brackenbury (another 12 Song Challenger). That’s either a huge coincidence, or there’s something really freaky going on.

The melody isn’t great, there are some things I’d change immediately, and the chords are too predictable for me. But as a start, this is really good.

Conclusions

Clearly this A.I. stuff is amazing technology. And as a tool to give me a creative kick-start it seems very useful. I still have serious reservations about the ecological impact of A.I., but I do think I’ll start to use ChatGPT (or a similar text generation tool) to help me with lyric writing.

Local songs for local churches

Posted on by chris

On the 1st September 2022 a new season of the Resound Worship ’12 Song Challenge’ starts. This set of monthly songwriting challenges – and the amazing online community which has formed – is “working together to grow in their creative gifts and serve their local church”.

I’ve been a member of this community for a couple of years, and find the people incredibly generous with their time and talents, wonderfully supportive, and truly gifted in the songs they are writing for their local churches. Of course, I’ve signed up for the new season.

But what does that mean: ‘songs for the local church’?

What is ‘the local church’?

For the purposes of this discussion the local church refers to a gathering of worshipping Christians in a localised geographic area. Often this will be centred around a specific building – but the building is not the church, the people are! – or a collection of related fellowships.

Crucially, the local church is made up of people who know each other – who are involved with each others’ lives on a regular basis, both during scheduled worship times and during the rest of the week. The extent of that involvement will vary from church to church and person to person, but we’ll see later why this ‘knowing one another’ is important.

Also, before we move on, I should point out that the slightly tongue-in-cheek title of this post (which is, of course, a reference to ‘The League of Gentlemen’) is meant with no disrespect!

What is a song?

In our discussion a song is lyrics set to music for use in congregational worship. That is, words written for the church to sing together. The only limits for these songs (past the obvious ones of theological accuracy and singability) are practical, based on style and arrangement. Each church is constrained by the musicians and resources available to them. A song which only works with a string orchestra won’t sound great with two recorders and a banjo, so in my experience churches have to be incredibly resourceful in how they use what they have.

So, what are ‘songs for the local church’?

We’re talking here about songs written by and for the local church. Songs written by members of the local church, for use in their own worshipping context (although some songs may get more widely shared).

The by and for bits are important: these are songs which reflect the life, struggles, hopes, dreams, prayers, and vision of the local church. They are songs which, while they may not name specific people in the fellowship, are about subjects familiar to the local people.

Here are a few examples of subjects local songs may tackle, although there’s no limit to what local songs can talk about, and human experience is often very similar across the world.

  • Social issues experienced locally: e.g. poverty, deprivation, crime
  • Particular physical or mental struggles experienced by church members: e.g. grief, depression, cancer
  • The aims of the local church: e.g. to reach out to the hurting, be a place of hope, plant more churches in nearby areas
  • Express aspects of worship relevant to the local church: joy, wonder, confusion

The bottom line here is the songs should be representative of that local church – even if the song is equally applicable to other local contexts. After all, a song named “Praise the God of creation” might represent a congregation with a focus on ecology as well as many other fellowships.

Songs in the Bible

If we look in the Bible we can see dozens of examples of songs which were written specifically about local issues of the time. The very first song in the Bible, in Exodus 15, was a song of thanks and praise after the Israelites had been delivered from Egypt. In fact, it almost looks like it’s a co-write between Moses and Miriam. The song names specific things about what happened – the waters closing over their enemies – amongst exclamations of praise and wonder, and declarations of the power and nature of God.

The book of Psalms is also chock-full of context-specific songs. We can see that by the inscriptions given to many of the chapters. Some of these are specific to the writer:

Psalm 3: A psalm of David. When he fled from his son Absalom.
Psalm 102: A prayer of an afflicted person who has grown weak and pours out a lament before the Lord.

Some are about specific events or times in the life of the community:

Psalm 30: A psalm. A song. For the dedication of the temple. Of David.
Psalm 92: A psalm. A song. For the Sabbath day.

And many are for specific people in the fellowship:

Psalm 85: For the director of music. Of the Sons of Korah. A psalm.

I’m no Bible scholar, but I suspect many of the Psalms reflect what was happening to the writer, or in the context in which they lived, at the time of writing. That’s to be expected: songs are mainly written from the personal perspective of the writer. As humans we have to work hard to see other perspectives to our own.

Before we look at the New Testament, there’s another example of local context-centric songwriting. In Judges 5 a song is sung by Deborah (who sounds like a formidable lady) which is utterly full of specific references to events that have just happened. The words in this song, like so many others in the Bible, may have meant something quite different – and probably a lot more personal – to the people hearing them at the time, than they do to us.

In the New Testament we are also encouraged to use music in worship. Both Ephesians 5:19 and Colossians 3:16 are clear that ‘psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs’ are to be used for the benefit of each other. While the early church had the Jewish scriptures to draw on, I suspect there were new songs being written at the time which expressed the fresh truth about Jesus. Those songs would have been almost exclusively written and used by the local church – there wasn’t much of a publishing industry back then!

Sing a new song

We are also exhorted in Psalms 33, 96, 98, 149, and in Isaiah 42:10 to “sing to the Lord a new song”. Even in the book of Revelation new songs are being sung (Rev 5:9, 14:3). It’s clear we shouldn’t rest on the laurels of previously-composed songs.

But why? Does God have a short attention span, constantly needing something fresh to liven up the boredom of being eternally worshipped? Of course not. I believe new songs are required for us. Writing new songs encourages us to remember what God has done for us, to put it into new words, to dig deeper into our understanding of his nature and love for us, and to express the full range of human emotion in ways that keep us sharpened.

New songs – particularly new local songs – help us to re-connect with ourselves, the world around us, and with God. So I believe that new local songs are vital for the worshipping life of a fellowship. I have three specific reasons why.

Why we should encourage local songwriting

First, it’s Biblically appropriate. We have seen many examples in the Bible where songs were written to celebrate specific events, express deep emotion, or draw together a worshipping community in vision and faith. It seems clear that songs written within the context of a local worshipping community can do the same today.

Second, local songwriting is culturally authentic. We don’t have to use songs where the musical style or language doesn’t suit our local context. We can write songs which are by us and of us.

Thirdly, it is pastorally encouraging to give people in a fellowship the opportunity to write songs which will be used in worship by that community. For some of us, songwriting gives us a way to engage with the Bible, our own beliefs, and with our context at a deeper level than thinking alone. Sometimes the fruits of that writing can be beneficial for the wider congregation.

It’s “and”, not “instead of”

None of what I’ve said is meant to be taken as a call to “Reject Redman!” or “Boycott Bethel!”. Worship leaders should draw on the best songs that meet the needs of their congregations, whether they were written by professional musician in a Californian mega-church, or by a teenager in your local church. Likewise, we shouldn’t be constrained by the age of the song – we have hundreds of years of history in writing music for worship, and we should draw on it all – whatever is appropriate to our local context.

We should also take care to ensure the quality of songs – whoever they are written by – is high. By quality I mean ensuring that they are theologically accurate, linguistically coherent, and musically pleasing! There is also a direct and sobering warning in Amos 5:23 that God will reject sung worship if the heart of the worshipper is not set on the right things. Encouraging local songwriting is not an excuse to pander to dreams of international fame.

What does seem strange to me is the common assumption that we should only use “proper”, published songs in our churches. While there are undoubtedly anointed songwriters who work professionally in the Christian music industry, deferring to only using their songs should be as strange to us as a world where we only use prayers centrally published, or only give sermons written by celebrity preachers. Let’s unlock the potential in our local churches to use songwriting as a way to express ourselves to God, and to share His love with the people around us.

A note to myself

Posted on by chris

Nothing to see here, please move along!

Wakefield Cathedral: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8JdEr_At4k

Jerusalem: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RZLoiMiv38

BibleMap: http://biblemap.org/

Bible GeoCoding: http://www.openbible.info/geo/

May the Lord,
Mighty God,
Bless and keep you forever.
Grant you peace,
Perfect peace,
Courage in every endeavor.
Lift up your eyes and see His face,
Keep His grace forever.
May the Lord,
Mighty God,
Bless and keep you forever.

Having a dream

Posted on by chris

I’ve been reading a book recently called “Gallant Women” which is a collection of stories of inspiring women and girls. Printed by the National Sunday School Union in the 1930’s it’s all a bit jolly-hockey-sticks, but entertaining all the same.

A quote in the story of Mary Jones particularly struck me:

But what is the good of a dream if it is concerned only with everyday and easy thing! A dream worth having is one which will take all your persistence and all your resources, and then need almost a miracle to be added, if it is ever to come true.

Easter

Posted on by chris

It’s not often I write about faith, at least not on a personal level. Time to remedy that. This picture from one of my favourite cartoonists jumped out at me and said something along the lines of “Why not?”. So, here I am.

Same cross. Different nails. I’m not sure what this picture meant to Hugh when he drew it, but for me it mirrors how I feel about various things at the moment. Time moves on, situations change, but we all carry the same cross. It’s just attached to us by different nails.

You see, things are in a state of flux at the moment, faith-wise. I’ve been a member of a fairly mainstream Church of England church for almost 5 years. But I’ve been treading water, to be honest. It’s easy to do that – especially if you know the church “drill” well.

But things need to change. It’s getting increasingly obvious that I have a responsibility to use whatever talents I’ve been given to make the church, the community in it and the outside community better. That sounds all grand and pompous, but of course I know I’m just one small wheel in the machine. But it only takes one wheel to get stuck and it affects everything. I think there’s something in the Bible which says something like that.

So what we, by which I mean the music group, are trying to change is firstly ourselves. If we can get a bit more real, a bit more passionate and heartfelt, a bit more sensitive, then maybe we’ll start having a positive effect on the church. This is, to put it bluntly, really scary and uncomfortable. Maybe we’ll do it, maybe we won’t. But after years of paddling at the edge it’s time I dived in.