Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto: these two songs composed by A.I. are worth listening to
Artificial intelligence is making waves for its impacts in health care, manufacturing, transportation, and a wide range of other fields, but now it’s entering the creative industries with impressive forays into music.
Sony’s CSL Research Laboratory has released two pop tracks, which were composed by an A.I. system called Flow Machines.
The first song, “Daddy’s Car,” an upbeat, harmony-filled tune, is reminiscent of The Beatles.
Meanwhile, a second track, “The Ballad of Mr. Shadow,” is slow and dreamy, and evokes the style of American composers Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Cole Porter and jazz musician Duke Ellington.
Flow Machines creates these works of art by first analyzing a massive database of 13,000 lead sheets — mainly jazz, pop but also some Brazilian, Broadway and other genres of music — and then composing a new work by following the patterns found in certain styles.
However, the A.I. wasn’t a solo act: it worked in concert with a human collaborator, French composer Benoit Carre, who arranged, produced and wrote the songs’ lyrics.
Flow Machines, which is also funded by the European Research Council, isn’t the company’s first attempt at A.I.-generated music.
Researchers at Sony’s CSL lab, which is headed by Francois Pachet, have previously used A.I. to create “impressive” jazz songs.
Google also released a 90-second piano melody created by its Magenta program, which uses a trained neural network, earlier this summer.
But Sony’s two tracks aren’t the end of its plans to take over the charts; the company is planning to release an entire album of A.I.-generated songs in 2017.