Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google's 'Project Magenta' Art Machine Composes Its First Song (thenextweb.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the auto-tune dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google's Project Magenta, which aims to use machine learning to create music and art, just created its first song. The song, which can be more appropriately described as a 90-second melody, is quite simplistic and reminiscent of an old Nokia ringtone. It's impressive for a machine! Magenta is built on top of its TensorFlow system, and all the open-sourced materials one could ever need are available through its Github. The team wants to be able to tell stories from the art it creates similar to that of artists. "The design of models that learn to construct long narrative arcs is important not only for music and art generation, but also areas like language modeling, where it remains a challenge to carry meaning even across a long paragraph, much less whole stories," the team wrote. "Attention models like the Show, Attend and Tell point to one promising direction, but this remains a very challenging task."

8 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. I wonder by johnsmithperson123 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    If we could use deep learning to let computers learn styles and patterns, eventually incorporating them into new music. It could usher in a new era where every film is composed by John Williams, or Mahler's tenth is finished, or there's a new Bach and Beethoven being made every day. Of course, on the arguably darker side, pop music could become entirely computer designed, although considering the quality it would actually sound better if done by computer.

    1. Re:I wonder by kheldan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Remember, artificial intelligence works like normal intelligence but only in fantasy and science fiction novels, we don't have real 'AI' in the real world.

      Fixed that for you.

      We don't even really have a clue how our own brains work yet, let alone being able to even begin to emulate it with a machine. All we have right now are cheesy imitations that fall way, way short of the mark.

      Don't anyone sit there and try to convince me that some cheesy algorithm is going to totally emulate human master composers because that's total and complete bullshit. Until we have fully human-level artificial intelligence, completely self-aware, with a full complement of human-level emotion and imagination, there won't be any machine-generated art of music that is equivalent to new works by human artists or human composers. Period.

      --
      Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
    2. Re:I wonder by ultranova · · Score: 2

      Don't anyone sit there and try to convince me that some cheesy algorithm is going to totally emulate human master composers because that's total and complete bullshit.

      Well, either the composer's brains work by magic or they can be emulated by some kind of machine.

      Until we have fully human-level artificial intelligence, completely self-aware, with a full complement of human-level emotion and imagination, there won't be any machine-generated art of music that is equivalent to new works by human artists or human composers. Period.

      Human beings, and thus human composers, aren't completely self-aware. One of the main weaknessess of human brain is precisely that it lacks general introspection facilities - or "debugger", if you prefer.

      --

      Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.

  2. is this copyrighted? by YesIAmAScript · · Score: 2

    If the monkey selfie isn't copyrighted (in the US at least), is this? Are creative works by computers copyrighted?

    --
    http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
  3. First song? by PCM2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Is it its first attempt, or only the first attempt that can reasonably be classified as a tune?

    --
    Breakfast served all day!
  4. this is trash by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's a crappy melody on top of a repetitious beat. Open the article and listen to it. Compared to the algorithmic music we've had in the past, this is a regression. I knew an undergrad in the 90s who was making computer generated motets better than this.

    And that's not even addressing the emotional aspects that are communicated through music. Totally banal (seriously, ,if you disagree with me, at least listen to the 'song' before explaining why you disagree).

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:this is trash by mccalli · · Score: 2

      It feels like the building blocks you'd use to hang a piece off, not the piece itself. You can easily imagine the first part, which is medium-level catchy, being used as the intro to all the complications, key changes, rhythmic additions, chordal backing etc. that would be needed to flesh this out into a real piece. Interestingly the bit where the algo tried to do a shift came off the weakest. It seems it new how to do broken arpeggios and a very basic chord structure, but then when it needed to shift into the 'emotional' bit and start doing legato expositions it completely lost the plot.

      Full disclosure - I write music and have put an album out, second one 'real soon now'. Honest'.

    2. Re:this is trash by mccalli · · Score: 2

      " It seems it new" - I hang my head in shame.