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Devin Coldewey, Seattle-based writer and photographer writes, Have you ever wanted to hear a concerto for
piano and harp, in the style of Mozart by way of Katy Perry? Well, why
not?
 |
| Photo: enjoynz / Getty Images under a Royalty free license. |
Because now you can, with OpenAI’s latest (and blessedly not potentially catastrophic) creation, MuseNet.
This machine learning model produces never-before-heard music based on
its knowledge of artists and a few bars to fake it with.
This is far from unprecedented — computer-generated music has been around for decades — but OpenAI’s approach appears to be flexible and scalable, producing music informed by a variety of genres and artists, and cross-pollinating them as well in a form of auditory style transfer. It shares a lot of DNA with GPT2, the language model “too dangerous to release,” but the threat of unleashing unlimited music on the world seems small compared with undetectable computer-generated text.
MuseNet was trained on works from dozens of artists, from well-known historical figures like Chopin and Bach to (comparatively) modern artists like Adele and the Beatles, plus collections of African, Arabic and Indian music. Its complex machine learning system paid a great deal of “attention,” which is a technical term in AI work for, essentially, the amount of context the model uses to inform the next step in its creation...
In addition to being able to belt out infinite bluegrass or baroque piano pieces, MuseNet can apply a style transfer process to combine the characteristics of both. Different parts of a work can have different attributes — in a painting you might have composition, subject, color choice and brush style to start. Imagine a Pre-Raphaelite subject and composition but with Impressionist execution. Sounds fun, right? AI models are great at doing this because they sort of compartmentalize these different aspects. It’s the same type of thing in music: The note choice, cadence and other patterns of a pop song can be drawn out and used separately from its instrumentation — why not do Beach Boys harmonies on a harp?
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Source: TechCrunch
