OK computer: When pop music meets machine learning

It's Moogfest season here in Durham, so there's been a lot of the discussion in the office around music, data lakes, and the heat map we're building for the festival. But the conversation took a different turn, thanks to a tweet. Many months ago when I was at IBM Insight, I tweeted a snide remark about computer-generated jokes. Fast-forward to this week, when former "Monk" and Letterman writer Joe Toplyn responded with a link "proving" that computers could generate jokes that were funny ... at least to the easily amused. Amid the discussion, someone drove by playing crappy autotune pop music. This got me thinking about whether you could generate hit pop songs.