Artificial intelligence create more than 100,000 new tunes based on Irish and English folk tunes

At turns lively and yearning, the traditional folk musics of Ireland and Britain have made their mark around the world. Now these perennially popular forms of music are helping computers learn to become a new kind of partner in music creation. A machine learning system overseen by a researcher in Sweden has produced 100,000 new folk tunes to date, generating a diverse range of reactions from folk musicians and the public. Some of the music can even be heard on a newly-released album by an Irish folk group. Bob Sturm, associate professor of computer science at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, says that the main idea of the project was to train computer models on folk music, so that they appear to have some musical intelligence, and then to "devise methods to unravel what they are actually doing," he says.