Google AI creats 80-second piano song

Having demonstrated the power of artificial intelligence (A.I.) with AlphaGo, Google has revealed its first accomplishment of AI project “Magenta,” which creates art works on Wednesday local time.

Google Brain, a deep learning research project at Google, has disclosed an 80-second piano song created by Magenta on its blog. Given four first notes, the song was composed through machine-learning algorithm. Other musical instruments with the only exception of the piano and orchestra accompaniment were played by humans.

On May 22, Google Brain announced at Moogfest, the four-day music and technology festival, in Durham, North Carolina that it would carry out the “Magenta project.” Its first accomplishment came out in about a month after the announcement.

“Magenta’s goal is to find out if A.I. can create a compelling form of art and music through machine learning,” said Google Brain. “The experiment will be based on 'If possible, how, and if impossible, why not?'” The team also said that Magenta’s program models and tools will be shared on GitHub, whose codes are openly shared so that anyone can have access to the source for further development.

Google has always had high interest in AI research in art area. It sold 29 pieces of abstract painting drawn by AI “Deep Dream” for some 97,600 U.S. dollars in February while Google’s AI engine is recently reading some 2,865 romance novel to prepare for its own romance novel.

임우선기자 imsun@donga.com