What kind of music do you listen? AI music, of course.

For the past decades, we’re constantly being told that Artificial Intelligence represents at the same time a huge step forward for mankind, and a threat to its existence. Robots are gradually replacing us in basic tasks of our daily life. Their role increases in science, to the point that robots are now able to make robots themselves. 

Naively, we’ve been always hoping that the artistic fields, such as music or literature, will remain the prerogative of men upon robots, since they deal with sensitivity. It’s a quite unique feature that robots can’t possibly have, and can’t reproduce it either. Apparently, we’ve been wrong. In fact, machines are now able to compose music and to paint, just like humans. We got used to the fact that robots could be sometimes more efficient than “human” musicians. But could we predict that they would also become composers?

Analysing thousands of masterpieces, integrating the data, and identifying the general characteristics of specific kinds of music, robots can now, compose such songs that couldn’t be distinguished from “human ones”. The most striking example of it happened in 1997, when several musicologists didn’t succeed to determine who wrote a piece. They unanimously asserted it was composed by Bach, while it was just a computer (EMI) using complex algorithms.

Back in 1957, the first song was written by an AI machine. This is what it looked like:

 

 More recently, the song Daddy's Car went viral as it sounded just like a band playing (with an influence of the Beatles), but was entirely composed by AI.

 

The objective, however, was to create a tool for musicians – a source of inspiration to write new original melodies. Though there should be something pretty frustrating in thinking that machines (that we mastered by the way) are more creative than we are… Don’t you think so? 

Original article from L'Express: here