Can machines make music? Google tests creative boundaries of AI.

The latest venture from Google's innovation team has many in the creative community pondering an old question: What is art? Magenta, the internet giant's latest artificial intelligence project, is a stab at programming an algorithm to create music. Magenta has already produced a single "song" of sorts, a four-note melody composed by Magenta and accompanied by a human-produced drum beat. "Machine learning has already been used extensively to understand content, as in speech recognition or translation," wrote Magenta researcher Douglas Eck in a blog post. "With Magenta, we want to explore the other side – developing algorithms that can learn how to generate art and music, potentially creating compelling and artistic content on their own."