A Neuromorphic Chip that Makes Music

A chip made by researchers at IMEC in Belgium uses brain-inspired circuits to compose melodies. The prototype neuromorphic chip learns the rules of musical composition by detecting patterns in the songs it's exposed to. It then creates its own song in the same style. It's an early demo from a project to develop low-power, general purpose learning accelerators that could help tailor medical sensors to their wearers and enable personal electronics to learn their users' patterns of behavior. Today's connected devices don't have much smarts on board--instead they send data into the cloud for analysis by remote servers, where energy use and cooling costs are not at a premium, says Praveen Raghavan, who leads technology development for neuromorphic computation at IMEC.