Inhuman music

Reading Time: 3 minutes

In the 21st century, artificial intelligence can do everything. Painting pictures, driving cars, helping doctors in medicine, and what about music? Does AI know how to compose music and write lyrics for songs?

In truth, an artificial intelligence can do this, too. Not with a soul, not with such a huge meaning, as a human does, because a robot has no feelings, but still knows how and even writes lyrics for music.

How exactly do neural networks create music? The general principle is that the neural network “looks” at a huge number of examples and learns to generate something similar. But it is impossible to formulate a task for a neural network to write beautiful music, because it is impossible to create a formula that will fulfill this task, since this is a non-mathematical requirement. It is interesting only when the neural network reproduces something that exists. The approach by which this music is created is called an auto-encoder (Generative Adversarial Network). It works like this:
We compress the music at the input into a very compact representation and then expand it back to its original form. A compact representation does not allow you to remember everything completely that was in the music. Therefore, the neural network is forced to put some common properties for music into the software part. And then, when generating music, we take a random sequence of numbers, apply the rules about the knowledge of music learned by the neural network and get a piece of music that looks like a human.

Turing Music Test
How to understand that a piece of music created by a machine is really worthy of our attention? To test the work of artificial intelligence systems, a Turing test was invented. His idea is that a person interacts with a computer program and with another person. We ask questions to the program and the person and try to determine who we are talking to. The test is considered passed by the program if we cannot distinguish the program from a person. For example, the DeepBach algorithm was tested, which generates notes in the Bach style. More than 1.2 thousand were interviewed. People (both experts and ordinary people) who had to distinguish the real Bach from the artificial one. And it turned out that it was very difficult to do this — people can hardly distinguish between music composed by Bach and created by DeepBach.

What about the lyrics?
Well, we’ve sorted out the musical compositions, but what about the lyrics for the songs? Can artificial intelligence compose poetry? Yes, and this task is even easier than writing melodies, although there are also enough difficulties here — the algorithm needs not only to “come up” with a meaningful text, but also to take into account its rhythmic structure.
In 2016, the developers of Yandex released the album “Neural Defense”. It includes 13 songs, the lyrics for which were composed by artificial intelligence. A year later, the album “Neurona” was released with four songs in the style of Nirvana, the verses for which were also generated by neural networks.

Thus, we see that artificial intelligence is able to write even music and lyrics for it, but will it ever replace songs written by a person in which feelings and life situations were invested?

Sources/references:

https://knowhow.pp.ua/ai_music

https://youtu.be/lv9W7qrYhb

https://youtu.be/-yTs58ityvs

https://towardsdatascience.com/generating-music-using-deep-learning-cb5843a9d55e

Tagged , ,

3 thoughts on “Inhuman music

  1. Natalia Namysłowska says:

    Recently I’ve been able to see how the sounds and music for audiobooks are made. It was actually a real shock. Contrary to what many people think, when we hear a choir or an orchestra playing in the background, it’s not recorded in a studio with hundreds of people singing and playing instruments. It’s all done by one person sitting for hours in a soundproof room with a computer and a keyboard that can be programmed to play millions of different sound combinations. Pre-recorded sounds can be key-bound to particular keyboard keys. That allows playing even violin or cello using a keyboard! Since humans are already using technology to compose music, it doesn’t surprise me that an AI could do it as well.

  2. Paulina Ceglarska says:

    For sure it’s a perfect tool for online creators, film productions, and games that need background music so that they can supply music with no royalties. Goodbye kiss for copyrights takedowns.
    Progress in AI music’s accelerating rapidly, but there’s still a long way from artificial intelligence being able to create top hit songs on their own, hence, creators shouldn’t be worried about losing jobs and being replaced by computers. Here’s one of my favourite AI songs that sounds like it comes from another dimension!: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgdTHbgzLr8
    Regarding the question above, techno music, for example, has no deeper message and it doesn’t matter to me, if it’s written by a person or a machine. But I think that love/meaningful songs written by humans will still find their way into people’s hearts because only humans can fully understand other humans.

  3. Gustaw Miksa says:

    We have got more and more reasons to think that the Turing test is just not good enough for today’s technology. Text generators, chatbots, and now also music generators can fool almost everyone. That being said, for me an interesting question is how can we check whether the work of an artist is his or her and not created by a program? Also to answer Your question, I believe that computer art won’t replace the one created by humans, but they will keep on growing simultaneously and inspiring one another.

Leave a Reply

WordPress › Error

There has been a critical error on this website.

Learn more about debugging in WordPress.