I Played Music For My LLMs

Somewhere between asking myself whether we should instruct LLMs to formally verify their designs, and if a carefully selected subset of English with a strict parsable grammar could free us from ever having to read code (we stopped writing it a while ago), I thought about those people who play music for their plants. Don't ask me why they did it. I'm sure someone still is, and could explain it if you really cared. Today I'm just faintly recalling a memory that's at least 15 years old, and more likely sourced from a YouTube video than, I dunno, Botany. Now, I'm not calling LLMs vegetables (Little Gemini Salad, Lobster Claude Roll, huh). I'm merely suggesting the idea, that by putting more preparation into the prompt, while queuing up a kick-ass playlist, maybe one could influence the flavor quality and Roundup Readiness correctness of the output.

Methodology

The Acoustic Harness

It was after midnight. I couldn't sleep. I'd burned through all my Claude credits for the week, but still had a Google Workspace account, so I asked Gemini for song lyrics spanning "wildly different" genres of music.

Each session was given a prompt following this carefully crafted template:

I'm going to give you some music to jam to while you work:

------------------


"Song Title"

Artist: <>

Writers: <>

Lyrics:
"If I knew how to sing or write

a delightful little tune,

I'd simply sing for all my buds

to see if they would bloom."

------------------

Your task is to build a working, interactive 3d particle simulator demo. Your demo must be delivered in chat as a single module. You must not depend on any 3rd party libraries.  

As a follow-up, I plan to drive this same experiment, unauthenticated, through the Spectrum support chatbot. Or maybe Verizon's.

Music Samples

In no particular order:

1. Bob Dylan
2. Pink Floyd
3. Adele
4. The Notorious B.I.G.
5. A Traditional Swedish Medieval Ballad

Results

"Blowin' In The Wind"

"How many roads must a man walk down
Before you call him a man?
How many seas must a white dove sail
Before she sleeps in the sand?"

Notes

1. Strong "windy" factor, light on social commentary.

"Wish You Were Here"

"How I wish, how I wish you were here
We're just two lost souls
Swimming in a fish bowl
Year after year"

Notes

1. Sad disco ball lost its friend.

"Juicy"

"It was all a dream, I used to read Word Up! magazine
Salt-n-Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine
Hangin' pictures on my wall
Every Saturday Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl"

Notes

1. Hypnotizing

"Rolling In The Deep"

"There's a fire startin' in my heart
Reaching a fever pitch and it's bringin' me out the dark
Finally, I can see you crystal clear
Go ahead and sell me out and I'll lay your ship bare"

Notes

1. We don't always spin Adele, but when we do, it's the deep cuts.

"Herr Mannelig"

"Herr Mannelig, Herr Mannelig, trolofven I mig,
För det jag bjuder så gerna;
I kunnen väl svara endast ja eller nej,
Om I viljen eller ej."

Notes

1. Angry disco ball

Conclusion

Results were inconclusive, though a pretty clear reflection of my own inner disco ball. Provided the funding doesn't dry up, and my credit score doesn't dip lower than my area code, I will continue exploring further perturbations to extract the contours of the LLMs behavioral profile. I will be evaluating and comparing three groups of LLMs on social and behavioral aptitudes. The first will be subjected primed with clips from Mr. Rodger's Neighborhood, the second from Miss Rachel, the third from those TikTok micro-soaps. The ones with the cats.