From Beethoven to bot-hoven: when machines start to write music

Is nothing safe from the reach of the machines? After replacing humans at repetitive tasks, beating them at games of skill, artificial intelligence is now making inroads into the arguably the last frontier: the creative arts. Ping An Technology, a subsidiary of China's second-largest life insurance company, has developed an award-winning computer algorithm that can generate original melodies after "studying" hundreds of pieces of piano music. But the company has no intention of stopping there. It is working towards using AI to create virtual singers and write original pop music based on individual tastes with a longer term goal of composing a symphony to potentially rival Beethoven. "Be it a Chinese version of break-up songs similar to Taylor Swift's style or a Shanghai accented voice that raps like Justin Bieber, with the upgrade of the AI music system we will be able to create whatever music you like as long as we know the genre and the type of singers you adore," said Xiao Jing, chief scientist of Ping An Technology.