Are consciousness and emotion essential components for creating music? Johann Sebastian Bach never completed his 18th-century work "The Art of Fugue," but now a computer might do it for him. University of Washington researchers on Wednesday released MusicNet, a large-scale classical music dataset aimed at helping machines understand the basic structure of classical music -- and even predict the next notes in a recording. The publicly available dataset includes 330 classical music recordings, along with more than a million annotated markers, verified by trained musicians, that indicate the timing of each note, the instrument that plays it and the note's position in a composition's metrical structure. "At a high level, we're interested in what makes music appealing to the ears, how we can better understand composition, or the essence of what makes Bach sound like Bach," Sham Kakade, a UW associate professor of computer science, engineering and statistics, said in a statement.

The Web giant on Wednesday unveiled a 90-second piano melody (mp3), the first piece of art created by machine learning as part of Project Magenta. The project, announced last week at Moogfest, is an artificial intelligence effort to create original music and visual art. Along with creating music and art, another goal of the project is to build a community of artists, coders and machine learning researchers, Douglas Eck, a research scientist working on Project Magenta, wrote in a blog post Wednesday explaining more about the team's ambitions. Eck wrote that the team wants to open-source the infrastructure, beginning with audio and video support. One of the greatest challenges of the project is not only creating art but also telling a compelling story, Eck wrote.

The Web giant on Wednesday unveiled a 90-second piano melody (mp3), the first piece of art created by machine learning as part of Project Magenta. The project, announced last week at Moogfest, is an artificial intelligence effort to create original music and visual art. Along with creating music and art, another goal of the project is to build a community of artists, coders and machine learning researchers, Douglas Eck, a research scientist working on Project Magenta, wrote in a blog post Wednesday explaining more about the team's ambitions. Eck wrote that the team wants to open-source the infrastructure, beginning with audio and video support. One of the greatest challenges of the project is not only creating art but also telling a compelling story, Eck wrote.