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Machine learning is enabling some brilliant things in art and music. The latest example, from Google’s creative research team
Magenta, is the Piano Genie — an AI program that lets you improvise fluently on the piano by simply bashing away at eight buttons, writes James Vincent, cover machines with brains for The Verge, despite being a human without one.
The team behind Piano Genie was inspired by Guitar Hero,
a game that also simplifies how to play an instrument. They didn’t want
users to just tap along to prewritten songs, but to make up pieces of
melody on the fly instead. To enable this, they trained an AI program on
a huge dataset of classical piano music, teaching it to predict what
notes follow each other the same way your phone’s predictive text
function guesses what you’ll write next. (You can also try out a web
version for yourself here.)
“I really wanted to design a tool that we could give to someone who doesn’t know how to play, and they’d be able to create music with some kind of intention,” Chris Donahue, an intern at Google Magenta and one of the trio that created Piano Genie, tells The Verge...
“I really wanted to design a tool that we could give to someone who doesn’t know how to play, and they’d be able to create music with some kind of intention,” Chris Donahue, an intern at Google Magenta and one of the trio that created Piano Genie, tells The Verge...
This was the main training data used to build a
predictive model of what piano notes follow one another. This also means
that the notes the Genie produces stick to certain keys and scales,
although this variant can be tweaked. Donahue adds that the data was
also useful as it was from a competition, meaning “people were playing
appropriately flashy things.”
The Genie team, which also included Google’s Ian Simon
and DeepMind’s Sander Dieleman, then had to design a pair of encoders
that could fit this output into a format that suited their Guitar Hero-like
controller. In other words, they had to shrink down 88 notes (the
standard number of keys on a piano) into just eight buttons. The last
part of the process was hooking all this up to a self-playing piano like
what you see in the videos.
Donahue says programs like Piano Genie show that AI can work to augment human creativity.
Read more...
Source: The Verge and Magenta Channel (YouTube)
