For Video Soundtracks, Computers Are the New Composers (npr.org)

Reader jader3rd writes: NPR has a story about computer composed soundtracks being used for small video projects.

Ed Newton-Rex, the company's founder, is a composer who studied computer programming, and says he started to ask himself: "Given what we know about how music's put together, why can't computers write music yet?" "You basically make a bunch of choices that really anyone can relate to," Rex says. "That's one of our aims. We wanted to make it as simple as possible, [to] really democratize the process of creation." Despite the successes there's been limited investment, because audiences and producers are uncomfortable with it. "On the credits they don't want to see 'Composed by Computer Program Experiments in Musical Intelligence by David Cope,' " he says. "It's the last thing they want to show their audience."

But how much longer will that last, until audiences are comfortable with seeing that a movies soundtrack was computer composed?

Comments

How To Actually Try This Service - Instructions

[dryriver]

Set your browser to https://www.jukedeck.com/ and click "Make" in the top right corner of the screen. Once you've created an account (email required), you can start playing with AI compositions. The options are a bit limited right now - you choose genre, speed, how many seconds in the compositions peaks and so forth. Then their cloud tech composes the track and records the resulting composition through machine learning driven synthesis.This takes about a minute. They describe the tech in more detail on their research blog. This tech is clearly in its infancy. But the audio tracks created are actually quite pleasant to listen to. Not much worse than typical stock music you'd buy for video tracks.

Computers have been doing this since the 1950s

[Solandri]

https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~blackrse/algorithm.html#computer

The earliest instance of computer generated composition is that of Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson at the University of Illinois in 1955-56. Using the Illiac high-speed digital computer, they succeeded in programming basic material and stylistic parameters which resulted in the Illiac Suite (1957). The score of the piece was composed by the computer and then transposed into traditional musical notation for performance by a string quartet.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/11/11/science/undiscovered-bach-no-a-computer-wrote-it.html

IN a low-key, musical version of the match between Garry Kasparov and the chess-playing machine called Deep Blue, a musician at the University of Oregon competed last month with a computer to compose music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Steve Larson, who teaches music theory at the university, listened anxiously while his wife, the pianist Winifred Kerner, performed three entries in the contest -- one by Bach, one by Dr. Larson and one by a computer program called EMI, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence.

Dr. Larson was hurt when the audience concluded that his piece -- a simple, engaging form called a two-part invention -- was written by the computer. But he felt somewhat mollified when the listeners went on to decide that the invention composed by EMI (pronounced ''Emmy'') was genuine Bach.