Daren Banarsë agrees on the benefits of collaboration. "I always find it daunting when I have to start a large-scale composition. Maybe I could give the computer a few parameters: the number of players, the mood, even the names of some of my favorite composers, and it could generate a basic structure for me," he says. "I wouldn't expect it to work out of the box, but it would be a starting point. Or it could output a selection of melodic ideas or chord progressions for me to look through. And somewhere in there, there's going to be a computer glitch or random quirk, which could take me in a completely unexpected direction."

In late May, a small crowd at St. Dunstan's church in East London's Stepney district gathered for two hours of traditional Irish music. But this event was different; the tunes it featured were composed, in part, by an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, dubbed folk-rnn, a stark reminder of how cutting-edge AI is gradually permeating every aspect of human life and culture--even creativity. Developed by researchers at Kingston University and Queen Mary University of London, folk-rnn is one of numerous projects exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative arts. Folk-rnn's performance was met with a mixture of fascination, awe, and consternation at seeing soulless machines conquering something widely considered to be the exclusive domain of human intelligence. But these expeditions are discovering new ways that man and machine can cooperate.