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The world's first AI-composed song sounds a lot like indie rock

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#1

Sony’s CSL Research Lab has released the first-ever AI-written song, composed by a program named Flow Machines. The song, composed in the style of The Beatles, sounds an awful lot like today’s twee indie rock, yet represents an incredible achievement for AI. While it sounds incredibly natural, the music was actually performed by a human who also wrote lyrics, FACT reports:

The Flow Machines software got its music knowledge from a huge database of sheet music with songs in varying styles and wrote that track after being given a style prompt from a human composer. The melody and harmony was composed by AI and then a human musician, French composer Benoît Carré, produced, mixed and wrote lyrics for the track.

You can listen for yourself below:

*Image of supercomputer via hexus.net

#2

To me this seems to be just another confirmation that traditional musical analysis tells us almost NOTHING about pop music. The algorithm analysed “sheet music” which, while specifying melody and harmony, cannot really specify microrhythm or timbre, both of which are for me the defining dimensions of pop music. What I would’ve done is, along with this version, given the song to 5 musicians working in different genres, then compared the results. Think you would end up with 5 completely different songs.
x Carl