The first full-length mainstream music album co-written with the help of artificial intelligence (AI) was released on 12 January and experts believe that the science behind it could lead to a whole new style of music composition. Popular music has always been fertile ground for technological innovation. From the electric guitar to the studio desk, laptops and the wah-wah pedal, music has the ability to absorb new inventions with ease. Now, the release of Hello World, the first entire studio album co-created by artists and AI could mark a watershed in music composition. Stemming from the FlowMachines project, funded by the EU's European Research Council, the album is the fruits of the labour of 15 artists, music producer Benoit Carré, aka Skygge, and creative software designed by computer scientist and AI expert François Pachet.

Douglas Eck, the project leader, posted Welcome to Magenta on its website on Jume 1st but had disclosed rather more about the project at Moogfest the previous week. He revealed that the inspiration for Magenta had come from other Google Brain projects, like Google DeepDream, where AI systems were trained on image databases to "fill in the gaps" in pictures, trying to find structures in images that weren't necessarily present in the images themselves. In the Magenta project Eck and his team want to see if, given enough training data, a machine could create music that would be engaging and exciting for a person to listen to. Eck also suggested that computer-created music could be used therapeutically, suggesting a scenario in which a person's wearable device tracking her heart rate sends a signal to her smartphone that she is stressed and an AI system could generate appropriately soothing music to alleviate the stress.