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| Photo: Rachael Myrow |
Some say AI is simply freeing humans of the boring tasks, so we can pursue activities that bring us joy. But what if AI is better at those things, too? Like, writing music?
For starters, we’re way past the advent of computer-composed music. That hurdle was crossed back in 1957 when professors Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign programmed the “Illiac Suite for String Quartet,” on the ILLIAC I computer.
Another big moment in computer music history: 1996, when Brian Eno’s album “Generative Music 1” was released on floppy disk, an old form of data storage familiar to Baby Boomers.
Here’s Eno back in the day talking about it on the now defunct BBC Radio 3 program, Mixing It. “To explain this simply, in the computer there’s a little synthesizer, basically. What I do is provide sets of rules that tell the computer how to make that sound card work,” Eno says.
The music his programming generated was different every time the program was run, but the code essentially dictated the output.
Today, scientists at lots of tech companies are working on something a little more sophisticated. Neural networks develop their own rules from the materials they’re fed.
Research scientist Doug Eck runs a group at Google called Magenta. “I think that what we’re doing that’s different from previous attempts to apply technology and computation to art is really caring about machine learning, specifically. Deep neural networks. Recurrent neural networks. Reinforcement learning. I guess the best way to put it is: it’s easier to help a machine learn to solve a problem with data than to try to build the solution in.”...
Music with Artificial Intelligence
It’s not bad. It’s not quite my cup of tea, either, but a lot of what makes music exciting to me is messy, idiosyncratic and specific to time and place. Then again, wait a few years, and it’s possible AI will be able to replicate that, too.
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Source: KQED and Andrew Huang Channel (YouTube)
