Fast Company | Business + Innovation: In May, Google research scientist Douglas Eck left his Silicon Valley office to spend a few days at Moogfest, a gathering for music, art, and technology enthusiasts deep in North Carolina's Smoky Mountains. Eck told the festival's music-savvy attendees about his team’s new ideas about how to teach computers to help musicians write music—generate harmonies, create transitions in a song, and elaborate on a recurring theme. Someday, the machine could learn to write a song all on its own.
1 comment:
This was a neat article. I had no idea Google (or anyone else, for that matter) was working on a project like this. It does surprise me that they're using MIDI, since it's so old. But on the other hand, MIDI gives the researchers everything they need to analyze these songs and create new ones based on discovered patterns. "Daddy's Car," one of the sample songs created by computers, sounded a bit off, but it was truly remarkable that it came from a computer. Had I not been primed with that knowledge, I wouldn't have been able to tell. The only place that song really fell short was the transitions between different parts of the songs. And even then, it didn't fall short by much. The development of this technology is really exciting. Imagine being able to open up a software program, input some parameters (key, instrumentation, genre, tempo, etc.) and have it generate a unique song for you. That would open up a world of possibilities for sound designers. On the other hand, it would make pop music even more bland.
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