The MCP MPC

Inspiration

The name, of course! What's more fun than a project with confusingly similar acronyms?

What it does

The MCP MPC makes the laborious process of trimming samples and making beats easy by allowing users to describe what they want in plain language. They can say "Gimme a lo-fi hip-hop beat but with electronic drums" or "Take this sample and pitch it down until it sounds like a sad ghost". The great thing about this is that by using WebMCP, musicians can actively collaborate in real-time with AI to make music - there's no automatically generated end result.

How we built it

With lots of Codex! I had the idea that the theme should follow the period in which the MPC became popular (90s) so I directed Codex to go with the 16-bit console theme. I also steered Sol to keep things fun and simple. I decided to deploy this to ChatGPT Sites as I had never done that before so wanted to learn more about it.

Challenges we ran into

Codex and I have different tastes in music! Some of the synthetic sounds and sample choices were, eh, interesting. They mostly sounded quite harsh and abrasive. Not the laid-back defaults I was hoping for. I also had a small CORS issue on Sites which was easily fixed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I think it's a really fun collaborative tool to use! Users can invoke the WebMCP interface to try out new ideas or tweak something existing. This seems like a glimpse into the future of music-making. I like giving the model really esoteric descriptions of drum patterns and seeing what happens.

What we learned

I'm glad I learned how powerful WebMCP could be in that I used it not just for pushing buttons on screen, but for altering precise values of sample timing as well. I was also surprised at how it encourages you to not solely use either the chat or the web interface. I've been using both 50:50.

What's next for The MCP MPC

I'd like to build out a more "pro" version, giving it even more capabilities. The problem with a lot of musical equipment is that its power is usually locked behind a thousand menus and a massive manual. WebMCP feels like it could cut right through that.