New artificial intelligence robot can create its own music

In a first, scientists have developed a marimba-playing robot that uses artificial intelligence to create its own music inspired by the works of musicians like Beethoven and Mozart. The robot with four arms and eight sticks writes and plays its own compositions on a marimba, using a database of well-known pop, classical and jazz artists. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology in the US fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs – from Beethoven to the Beatles to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis. They worked with the robot named'Shimon' for seven years, enabling it to listen to music played by humans and improvise over pre-composed chord progressions. Shimon is now a solo composer generating the melody and harmonic structure on its own, researchers said.