How Google's Music-Making AI Learns From Human Minds At Festivals

Some of the sounds are reminiscent of a vintage synthesizer, but what's happening here is much more modern. A powerful neural network is helping to create these tones in the hopes of offering musicians a cutting-edge new tool for their creative arsenal. Over time, the machines will learn to create music themselves. The classroom is being led by Adam Roberts and Colin Raffel, two Google engineers working on the Magenta project within the rapidly expanding Google Brain artificial intelligence lab. First unveiled to the public last May at the Moogfest music and technology festival in Durham, NC, Magenta is focused on teaching machines to understand and generate music and building tools that supplement human creativity with the horsepower of Google's machine learning technology.