Can AI write music with a little help?Sometimes when I'm sitting at the piano making up a tune, I wonder why a computer couldn't do the same thing... well, not quite. I do appreciate that computers don't know whether something sounds good or not, but they could still be programmed to combine a set of rules/guidelines with randomness to get a new melody, rythm, and harmony. If I were to try this out, I would structure things so that the computer would make something up, and then you as the listener would give it a rating of 1-5 stars. At first it would just be the melody with some basic rythm. Once it had come up with a 5-star melody of a sufficient length, it would add some more rythm to it, and each time it tried something, you would again rate the addition with 1-5 stars. By now you'd have a nice melody, complete with rythm. Time to add in some harmony. This is where there would be lots of opportunity to code in good AI... the complexity/variation is enormous, but if you did a good job, I think it could be a powerful and entertaining way of creating a song, especially for people who know what sounds good when they hear it, but don't know how to make music from scratch. I can imagine a keen 10 year old showing there parent some music that they had made using this approach and it being quite good!Update: May-08: Apparently Ray Kurzweil did something very similar a few decades back and got lots of press coverage for it :) |