Can a machine really write a good song? Sound scary? Perhaps, a more interesting question is, how might a musician collaborate with a machine to write a song or make art? Google is funding projects that explore these questions and they want artists to get involved.
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Google has launched Magenta, a project from the Google Brain team that asks: “Can we use machine learning to create compelling art and music?”
In the announcement, Magenta explains its two goals:
“First, it’s a research project to advance the state of the art in machine intelligence for music and art generation. Machine learning has already been used extensively to understand content, as in speech recognition or translation. With Magenta, we want to explore the other side—developing algorithms that can learn how to generate art and music, potentially creating compelling and artistic content on their own.”
“Second, Magenta is an attempt to build a community of artists, coders and machine learning researchers. The core Magenta team will build open-source infrastructure around TensorFlow for making art and music. We’ll start with audio and video support, tools for working with formats like MIDI, and platforms that help artists connect to machine learning models. For example, we want to make it super simple to play music along with a Magenta performance model.“
How To Get Involved
If you want to get involved, check out the Artists and Machine Intelligence blog and group here. It’s a program at Google that brings together artists and engineers to realize projects using Machine Intelligence.
Listen to a 90 second track that the Magenta team
created using machine learning here.