(Deep) House: Making AI-Generated House Music

People have been trying to make machine generated music for a long time. Some of the earliest examples were musicians punching holes in piano roles to create complex melodies unplayable by humans (see Conlon Nancarrow, 1947). More recently, it's looked like electronic music in the form of MIDI files, where, by specifying various attributes --the instrument, pitch, duration, and timing--songs can be symbolically represented. But what does it look like for AI to run the whole generation process? This article explores generative audio techniques, training OpenAI's Jukebox on hours of house music.