Some of the sounds are reminiscent of a vintage synthesizer, but what's happening here is much more modern. A powerful neural network is helping to create these tones in the hopes of offering musicians a cutting-edge new tool for their creative arsenal. Over time, the machines will learn to create music themselves. The classroom is being led by Adam Roberts and Colin Raffel, two Google engineers working on the Magenta project within the rapidly expanding Google Brain artificial intelligence lab. First unveiled to the public last May at the Moogfest music and technology festival in Durham, NC, Magenta is focused on teaching machines to understand and generate music and building tools that supplement human creativity with the horsepower of Google's machine learning technology.

JUDY WOODRUFF: The idea, how technology, music and science can inspire one another, and to the creation of distinct new sounds. Jeffrey Brown is back to take us to an unusual gathering held just a few days ago in Durham, North Carolina. JEFFREY BROWN: Start with a circuit board, add knobs and dials, solder everything together, and, eventually, if you know what you're doing, you have an instrument that can do this. Moogfest, named after inventor Robert Moog, is a celebration of the art, engineering and technology of synthesizers, machines that create sounds electronically. By night, it's a festival of different genres of music, centered on, as they call them here, synths.

Google's next foray into the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence will be a creative one. The company has previewed a new effort to teach AI systems to generate music and art called Magenta. It'll launch officially on June 1st, but Google gave attendees at the annual Moogfest music and tech festival a preview of what's in store. As Quartz reports, Magenta comes from Google's Brain AI group -- which is responsible for many uses of AI in Google products like Translate, Photos and Inbox. It builds on previous efforts in the space, using TensorFlow -- Google's open-source library for machine learning -- to train computers to create art.

Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam," processed through Google DeepDream (image via Kyle McDonald/Flickr) Can artificial intelligence create art? In recent years, we've seen plenty of attempts to answer this question, from portrait-painting robots to Aaron, a computer program that makes neon abstractions. Now, Google is launching Magenta, an effort to generate original music, video, images, and text using machine intelligence. Part of Google Brain, the company's deep learning research project, Magenta will explore whether artificial intelligence can create art. "There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," Google researcher Douglas Eck said during a panel at MoogFest, a technology and music festival.

With its new music-and-art project, called Magenta, Google is putting the "art" in artificial intelligence. The minds inside the Google Brain team have released a 90-second piano melody that was generated through machine learning. The project, first announced at Moogfest, is built on top of Google's TensorFlow, the web giant's open-source AI engine. Magenta's algorithm was primed with only four notes to start with, and it took off from there to plunk out a verse and bridge of sorts. The drum parts were added later for texture.

Can computers be truly creative? More specifically, can people bestow upon machines what we know as creativity and have the machines thinking creatively? Google knows that an answer does not come easily and some people may argue that the answer is hairy. Do all people agree on what makes creativity creativity? Depending on what kind of definition you go by, if you build software that can take a note sequence and turn it into a melody by finding patterns where do you place it on the scale of creativity?

Google introduced a new group dedicated to making artificial intelligence more creative at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina, Quartz first reported. Called Magenta, the group will use its AI system TensorFlow to see if AI can be trained to create its own art, music, and video. The ultimate goal is to see if AI could give a listener "musical chills" by generating entirely new pieces of music, Quartz reported. Google made TensorFlow open source in November so that any developer can use it. TensorFlow works by using deep learning, a process where machines learn to complete tasks all on their own, to recognize images.

Google introduced a new group dedicated to making artificial intelligence more creative at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival in Durham, North Carolina, Quartz first reported. Called Magenta, the group will use its AI system TensorFlow to see if AI can be trained to create its own art, music, and video. The ultimate goal is to see if AI could give a listener "musical chills" by generating entirely new pieces of music, Quartz reported. Google made TensorFlow open source in November so that any developer can use it. TensorFlow works by using deep learning, a process where machines learn to complete tasks all on their own, to recognize images.

Google's artificial intelligence has already taken on the form of a human nerd, but now it's time for its next act. Can AI be an artist? Douglas Eck, a researcher working on Google Brain, recently revealed that the team will soon launch a new project called Magenta. Though it took some inspiration from DeepDream, another Google Brain scheme that yielded trippy-as-hell images (amongst other things), Magenta has one key difference: It will try to figure out if computers can actually create art, instead of reproducing or distorting it. Magenta is set to launch in a more official capacity in early June, but Eck provided some early insights during a recent discussion at Moogfest, a music, art and technology festival.

Google wants to put the art back in artificial intelligence. During the last session at Moogfest, a four-day music and technology festival, in Durham, North Carolina, Douglas Eck, a researcher on Google Brain, the company's artificial-intelligence research project, outlined a new group that's going to focus on figuring out if computers can truly create. The group, called Magenta, will launch more publicly at the start of June, but attendees at Moogfest were given a taste of what it's going to be working on. Magenta will use TensorFlow, the machine-learning engine that Google built and opened up to the public at the end of 2015, to determine whether AI systems can be trained to create original pieces of music, art, or video. This is no simple task, given that even the most advanced artificially intelligent systems have enough trouble copying the styles of existing artists and musicians, let alone coming up with entirely new ideas themselves.