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| There's an app for that. Photo: Quartz |
Donya Quick, a lecturer in Yale’s computer science department, has built a computer program that can create music that the university reported has already confused some “music sophisticates” into thinking it was composed by J.S. Bach. Quick’s machine-learning system, which she’s called Kulitta, uses a library of different genres and styles of music as a basis for entirely original pieces of music.
Automated Music Composition With Kulitta Software
Kulitta is not the first program made to generate music—computer scientist and musician David Cope has been working on software like this for decades—but Quick’s late advisor Paul Hudak previously told Yale that with Kulitta, “you can create sounds that no one’s ever heard before.”
The software works as past music-generation programs have: It can learn the rules of harmony and pitch mapping by analyzing any music fed into it. But Kulitta can also choose to compose music that doesn’t follow the strict rules in classical and jazz styles, as well as combine styles from different genres. Similar to IBM’s Watson, which uses chemical analysis to pair flavors for dishes that humans would not likely think of on their own, Kulitta can transcend genres to create entirely new music. In a demonstration for Yale, Quick asked Kulitta to write a short piece that combined a jazz harmony in the middle of a Bach-influenced chorale. Pleased with the result, Quick told Yale, ‘This might be what Bach would have done if he knew about jazz.’”
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Source: Quartz and YaleCampus Channel (YouTube)
