The big guns are firing in the race to create a credible AI-assisted composing platform. First we had Amazon AWS's DeepComposer, a machine learning-enabled system that combines software and a dedicated MIDI keyboard, and now Sony Computer Science Laboratories has officially launched Flow Machines, an AI-assisted music production project. Sony CSL has apparently been conducting music research since 1996, launching Flow Machines as a research and development project in 2012. It's based on an AI-assisted plugin known as Flow Machines Professional (FM Pro), which: "combines music rules generated by analyzing a variety of music with advanced software technology to help creators to freely create various styles of melodies based on their own concepts". The thinking behind FM Pro is that it combines human creativity with AI-based music.