Google’s AI Music Experiment

Many musicians feel threatened by the artificial intelligence programs that are now trying to create songs based on the music that they’ve learned. Yes, it’s scary when the robots take over, but perhaps we’re looking at it all wrong, as illustrated with this Google AI music experiment.

A.I. Duet, as shown in the video below, is actually part of Google’s Magenta project, which was created to see if machine learning could actually create some compelling music. Yotam Mann coded A.I. Duet and made it open source so anyone can use it to program their own neural net.

While the music that Duet comes up with isn’t that great (at least in this video), one of the things that I find interesting is the possibility of actually playing along with an ever-changing computer musician who’s also listening to you. Not only does that sound like a potentially great learning experience, but should be fun too.

Maybe we shouldn’t be so afraid of AI music after all.

You can access the code a g.co/aiexperiments.