AI’s presence in the music domain has expanded from music selection to music production, and now even to music duetting! Google’s ‘AI Duet’ is a music-playing piano bot that allows the user to input notes of their choosing (by the on-screen keyboard / computer keys), immediately responding with its own melody. This was done by Google’s Creative Lab, in order to showcase the potential of AI in learning human behaviour and producing art.
How does it work?
Ai Duet makes use of neural network technology; it takes the inputted notes and processes them through a neural network (pre-trained with examples). Identifying certain rhythms or melodies from its note map, it can generate melodies that are suitably timed with the user input.
Check it out here: aiexperiments.withgoogle.com/ai-duet/view/
What other music projects has Google done?
Google has a plethora of other musical explorations. It has a phone app that creates a rap based on the view from a user’s phone camera, hence effectively blending a speech synthesizer with image recognition. Another instance is Google’s infinite drum machine, organizing everyday sounds and placing similar sounds next to each other by t-SNE. These can then be used to make beats with the drum sequencer!
Sources
https://www.rhinegold.co.uk/international_piano/google-ai-duet/ https://www.theverge.com/2017/2/16/14641462/google-ai-duet-experiment-music-art-software
Written by Amanda Y