How I Used ChatGPT to Identify Two Songs I Heard Once — Over 30 Years Ago

#chatgpt #ai #promptengineering #casestudy

A personal memory retrieval turned technical challenge — and how ChatGPT helped solve it.

🎯 The Challenge

I had been searching for two songs for decades. One was a dreamy eurobeat track, the other a dance cover with a female vocal.

I had no artist, no title, no recording — only a feeling, a rough memory of the beat, and the fact that I heard each one only once on the radio in Belgrade in the early ’90s.

🧠 Using ChatGPT as a Research Tool

Instead of asking “What song is this?”, I approached ChatGPT like a research assistant.

Here’s what I gave it:

Vocal style: Female
Era clues: One was from the late ’80s/early ’90s, the other from the mid-’90s
Beat style: One had a groove similar to Back to Life by Soul II Soul; the other leaned more toward eurobeat
Context: Both songs were aired only once on Belgrade radio stations during a time of severe UN sanctions
Data issue: One track was misidentified as “Three Times” due to a faulty RDS display
Memory anchor: I remembered a single chorus line from one of them

I turned that into a structured query — and then refined it through several iterations.

✅ The Result

After a series of narrowing-down steps, ChatGPT helped identify two songs I never expected to find:

“Dreamtime” – Zee (misread on radio as “Three Times”)
“Dream” – W.I.P. (a 1991 dance cover of “All I Have to Do Is Dream”)

🔍 Prompting Breakdown

- Structured inputs: genre, rhythm, era, vocal type, source context
- Prompt chaining: refining results based on emotional match and memory fragments
- Rejection criteria: wrong mood, wrong lyrics, wrong production style
- AI cross-referenced musical style, RDS errors, historical distribution

🤔 Why This Matters

LLMs aren’t just for coding, summarizing, or rewriting emails.

They can act as context engines — helping us reconnect with pieces of our lives that search engines left behind.

💬 Final Thoughts

This wasn’t just about finding songs. It was about proving how human memory + AI reasoning can solve a decades-old emotional puzzle.

And to write it using the very same ChatGPT that helped me find those songs in the first place — that was part of the closure.

Because this isn’t just my story. It’s a reminder that humans + AI can bring back something deeply personal — something even search engines forgot.

Ever used AI to find a lost piece of your past? Let me know in the comments.