Now Artificial Intelligence Is Inventing Sounds That Have Never Been Heard Before

As well as beating us at board games, driving cars, and spotting cancer, artificial intelligence is now generating brand new sounds that have never been heard before, thanks to some advanced maths combined with samples from real instruments. Before long, you might hear some of these fresh sounds pumping out of your radio, as the researchers responsible say they're hoping to give musicians an almost limitless new range of computer-generated instruments to work with. The new system is called NSynth, and it's been developed by an engineering team called Google Magenta, a small part of Google's larger push into artificial intelligence. "Learning directly from data, NSynth provides artists with intuitive control over timbre and dynamics and the ability to explore new sounds that would be difficult or impossible to produce with a hand-tuned synthesizer," explains the team. NSynth takes samples from about a thousand different instruments and blends two together them together, but in a highly sophisticated way.