Google AI Makes Music

A Google artificial intelligence project has written a mediocre piano melody. It’s definitely a case of the process being more interesting than the product.

The project, Magenta, is part of Google Brain which is the company’s machine learning department. Magenta is an attempt to advance machine learning beyond understanding content to creating art and music.

According to Magenta’s Douglas Eck, the challenges include making an algorithm that can generate art or music, keep the audience’s attention while surprising them, and tell an overall story rather than being “good in small chunks.” There’s also an inherent problem in evaluating the success of such algorithms being that what counts as good and successful art and music is at the very least partly subjective.

The initial output of the project is a 90-second “piano” piece that was created by Magenta from an input of four notes. There’s something of a cheat in the piece as humans on the project then took the piano track and added a drum track as an aural backdrop.