French-speaking conference
On December 1, the music school directors of the French-speaking cantons met for their Conférence romande. They were hosted by the Conservatoire de Fribourg, a cantonal music school with over 40 teaching sites and some 4000 students. "This exchange is very valuable for us, as the canton's only music school," explains Nils Perrt, member of the management board. "It gives us the opportunity to get to know other music schools."
Among the items on the agenda was a contribution to continuing education proposed by Richard-Emmanuel Eastes, from HES-SO. About a year after the appearance of ChatGPT and other generative AIs, the speaker took stock of the situation. He began by asking, "How many of you have already tested ChatGPT?" Almost every hand went up. Asked how many participants regularly use generative AI tools, a third again answered yes. Richard-Emmanuel Eastes demonstrated conversations with ChatGPT, created images and showed how AI was constantly improving, including in the music field. "ChatGPT is not Wikipedia, it doesn't gather knowledge," he stressed, "it's only interested in rules and probabilities." To illustrate his point concretely, he convinced ChatGPT that the key of D major has three sharps in the key, whereas it only has two, whereupon the AI apologized and agreed with him. However, ChatGPT also proves very useful as an assistant: it summarizes long texts, suggests ideas and formats e-mails, to name but a few examples.
Philippe Müller then provided information from the association. In particular, he announced that in 2025, the Swiss Association of Music Schools will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary with a kind of Tour de Suisse, in collaboration with the Kinderdorf Pestalozzi Foundation's PowerUp radio station. The "Jeunes Talents Musique" incentive program and its progress in the various cantons also provoked a lively discussion.
Finally, the question of the future of the Conférence romande was also on the agenda. From 2024 onwards, there will be changes, at least in organizational terms, as it was decided at the Delegates' Meeting on November 23 that regional conferences will no longer be organized on a top-down basis, but on a bottom-up basis. This means that ASEM will no longer organize regional conferences itself, but will be happy to provide support where needed. The interventions at the meeting clearly showed that this need exists in French-speaking Switzerland. Representatives from the canton of Vaud have made themselves available to organize the Romande Conference in 2024.
Photos: Anicia Kohler
