MIT's music AI can identify instruments and isolate their sounds

If you've ever played a YouTube video for what it seems like the thousandth time to listen to your instrument's part of a composition, you'll love MIT's new AI. PixelPlayer, which hails from the institution's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), can recognize instruments in a video, identify specific ones at pixel level and isolate the sounds they produce. If there are several instruments playing in a video, for instance, PixelPlayer will allow you to pick the one you want to listen to -- it will play the sounds coming out of that instrument the loudest and will lower the volume or everything else. CSAIL trained PixelPlayer by using a self-supervised deep learning technique and feeding it over 60 hours of videos to learn from. It's still far from perfect, though: it can only identify the sounds of 20 instruments at the moment and is still having trouble telling similar ones apart.