CHESTNUT HILL -- Jesuit Father Phillip Ganir wasn't expecting to see James Brown CDs in a French monastery.

It was summer 2024, and the assistant professor of religious education at Boston College's Clough School of Theology and Ministry was visiting the Benedictine Abbey of Saint-Pierre in Solesmes, France. The abbey has a long history of music appreciation, from Gregorian chant to bluegrass and jazz. Its gift shop featured soap, candles, granola, and chocolate made by the monks, as well as CDs -- not only sacred music but the works of Brown, Chuck Berry, Nat King Cole, and Fats Domino. The monks of Solesmes are part of the European Union's Repertorium project, which uses artificial intelligence to digitally preserve the abbey's ancient music manuscripts. The AI is responsible for organizing and processing the two million compositions that will be fed to it as data. This, Father Ganir said, is what AI is best at: sorting data by recognizing patterns in massive quantities of information. But will this allow AI to "compose" its own sacred music, in the same way that it generates photorealistic images and video?

That was the topic of "Chant GPT? Navigating AI, Sacred Music, and its Impact on Liturgical Worship," a talk Father Ganir gave at Boston College on Nov. 14. The talk began with Father Ganir leading the audience in singing Psalm 149, which he assured them "was composed by an actual human being."

"AI can be an ally, as Pope Leo recently remarked," Father Ganir said. "But vigilance and discernment are still necessary. To the extent that AI can help accentuate, elevate, and highlight the truths of our faith, then I amplify the words of theologian Matthew Petrusek: 'Praise God and pass the algorithm.'"

The phrase "Chant GPT" was coined by liturgist Alan Hommerding in 2023, when generative AI was brand new. Father Ganir said that theologians and composers found that the technology was able to generate liturgies "with relatively close theological precision." He asked an AI model to compose a Gregorian chant in Mode 2. What he received was a piece in broken Latin with awkward notation.

"Even if my GPT had been able to produce a melodically compelling tune, composers know that what looks good on a page does not necessarily translate well into a singing group," Father Ganir said.

He referenced the work of musicologist Christopher Small, who said that the act of creating music is as vital as the music itself.

"This is particularly important because music needs to be understood beyond score and sound, but music's human dimension," Father Ganir said, "how it is performed, heard, rehearsed, practiced, composed, or even danced."

He separated the audience into three groups and asked each of them to sing a different note, making a chord.

"We don't have to look far in the tradition to appreciate how the musical chord is a profound way of expressing the Trinity," he said.

He referenced St. Ignatius's description of the Trinity as "three keys."

"Music gives us a particularly powerful analogy expressing this mystery because our ears are trained to hear at the same time both the full chord and individual notes all mixed in together," he said.

In the Catholic Church, Father Ganir said, music is the most important art form of all because it is a way to speak the Word of God. He gave the example of Estonian composer Arvo Part's "Spiegel im Spiegel," which was inspired by the composer's own spiritual awakening. Part was the first composer to win the Pope Benedict XVI Foundation's Ratzinger Prize.

"No theological treatise, but his music scores," Father Ganir said. "That in and of itself reveals something powerful about music."

"Spiegel im Spiegel" features a triad pattern, which many scholars have interpreted as referencing the Trinity. It has inspired everything from the theme of "The Simpsons" to Icelandic avant-garde pop sensation Bjork. The piece gives no guidance on how loudly or softly the musicians should play.

"Part relies on performers to interpret it, and to have 'faith' in the simplicity of the notes and sparse harmonic structure," Father Ganir said. "The point is to show that while AI might be able to imitate structures and symmetry, an essential component to music is the actual act of music-making, a task that necessarily relies on the ability of the person aware of other people in the moment."

Music, he said, is the perfect metaphor for life and theology. Being a synodal church requires being in harmony with one another, and the seemingly divine perfection of harmonious melodies is contrasted with the haunting feeling of dissonance. Composers have long used the dissonant "devil's tone" to provoke fear in their listeners or symbolize evil. Father Ganir played the awe-inspiring finale of the first movement of Sir James Macmillan's Fifth Symphony, the only symphony in the Western repertoire entirely devoted to the Holy Spirit.

"Unlike the symmetry of Part's Spiegel," he said, "you have a landscape of musical drama, intensity, and unpredictability, aspects of music-making that only complicates the act of imitation but elevates human ingenuity and creativity."

Father Ganir answered questions from the audience after his remarks. One question came from Scott Molony, who described himself as an AI ethicist and "fairly mediocre tenor." Referencing its use in health science, Molony said that AI is saving human labor by "helping people do some of the really hard and tricky bits." He asked Father Ganir if the same thing could happen in music.

"I know that the algorithm cannot raise its mind and heart to the Spirit because it doesn't have one," he said. "But how can this help the composer do that?"

Father Ganir said that AI is currently best at restoring music. For instance, Jesuit Father T. Frank Kennedy, a musicologist at Boston College, led a team that recovered thousands of heavily-damaged music manuscript pages in Bolivia in the 1980s. The work to reconstruct them was "painstaking."

"This is where I think that technologies can actually be very helpful in allowing communities of faith, especially if they have particular music patrimony, rediscover, reorient themselves, absorb what had been part of the past so that they're able to reappropriate it and understand what it means for their own cultural identity," Father Ganir said.

Molony, who is studying for his licentiate in sacred theology from the Clough School, told The Pilot he was happy to hear that the church is aware of AI's abilities and is approaching the issue thoughtfully.

"Father Ganir is a mentor and friend, but I think this shows how the academy is continuing to grapple with artificial intelligence's sudden rise," he said, adding, "How do we learn to integrate this tool in a way that is helpful and fruitful, but not destructive?"

He doesn't think that AI-generated sounds will replace music composed and sung by humans.

"I think the Spirit will always move the human heart, and I think that there are things that people will always feel that they need to communicate in ways that can't be expressed purely through voice alone," he said.