Computers Are Learning To Write Songs By Listening To All Of Them

In May, Google research scientist Douglas Eck left his Silicon Valley office to spend a few days at Moogfest, a gathering for music, art, and technology enthusiasts deep in North Carolina's Smoky Mountains. Eck told the festival's music-savvy attendees about his team's new ideas about how to teach computers to help musicians write music--generate harmonies, create transitions in a song, and elaborate on a recurring theme. Someday, the machine could learn to write a song all on its own. Eck hadn't come to the festival--which was inspired by the legendary creator of the Moog synthesizer and peopled with musicians and electronic music nerds--simply to introduce his team's challenging project. To "learn" how to create art and music, he and his colleagues need users to feed the machines tons of data, using MIDI, a format more often associated with dinky video game sounds than with complex machine learning.