Bach to the future: AI, meet classical music

Are consciousness and emotion essential components for creating music? Johann Sebastian Bach never completed his 18th-century work "The Art of Fugue," but now a computer might do it for him. University of Washington researchers on Wednesday released MusicNet, a large-scale classical music dataset aimed at helping machines understand the basic structure of classical music -- and even predict the next notes in a recording. The publicly available dataset includes 330 classical music recordings, along with more than a million annotated markers, verified by trained musicians, that indicate the timing of each note, the instrument that plays it and the note's position in a composition's metrical structure. "At a high level, we're interested in what makes music appealing to the ears, how we can better understand composition, or the essence of what makes Bach sound like Bach," Sham Kakade, a UW associate professor of computer science, engineering and statistics, said in a statement.