Computers Are Learning To Write Songs By Listening To All Of Them

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. The format has come a long way since 1990s Geocities pages and games like Doom, thanks to better computing power, digital samplers, and recent movements like "Black MIDI," in which MIDI musicians like Lee saturate a digital musical score with so many notes, typically in the thousands or millions, that little white peers through. The state of the art in training computers is deep learning, artificial learning that uses neural networks, a method of storing information that loosely approximates the information processing of the brain and nervous system. In computer vision, where deep learning has become the standard machine learning technique, scientists know how a computer learns through a neural network when the computer knows what shapes to look for in an image.