The Creative Processor

With a souped-up reproducing piano and some ingenious learning machines, AI maestro Gerhard Widmer is discovering how performers unlock the art in Mozart. A gray-blue dusk is settling over the Gothic cathedrals, palatial opera houses, and labyrinthine streets of Vienna's First District. Here in the Austrian capital, music is an almost elemental force. It's a place where very old and very new musical traditions collide and intermingle – the perfect setting for a computer scientist obsessed with examining the blips and fault lines, deviations and inventions, that transform music into something more than code and just slightly less than magic. This article has been reproduced in a new format and may be missing content or contain faulty links. Contact wiredlabs@wired.com to report an issue. It's Friday evening, and most of his fellow teachers at the University of Vienna have already gone home, but associate professor Gerhard Widmer is bounding up the stairs of a peach-colored Baroque building and into the offices of the Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence. He waves hello to his team scientists – Simon Dixon, Emilios Cambouropoulos, and Werner Goebl – and makes for a computer monitor marked EUROPA, which is jacked into an electric piano. Widmer eagerly begins to trigger several audio files.