Can Artificial Intelligence Make Good Music?

I have a close friend who's a pretty successful software engineer and he loves AI I see him reading books on neural networks articles on deep mind and the like I can't pretend to understand his field but he raises an interesting question is it possible that at some point in the future machines will be able to produce music indistinguishable from that of a human what my friend argues is if music is ultimately a set of patterns then hypothetically a machine could be fed hundreds or thousands of these patterns and learn from it it could practice writing its own music iterate and gradually learn to produce something indistinguishable from a human's creation or maybe even better than a human's creation of course my knee-jerk reaction is to say no that's impossible it would never work a machine could never adequately recreate expressive emotionally-charged music but that's not really an argument if a machine can learn from thousands of great works of music if it could figure out patterns and begin to churn out its own pieces perhaps it could reach a point where it started putting out pieces of strong expressive quality even if it doesn't share the human experience itself so this problem bares thinking about on a deeper level of course one of the core assumptions of this is that music can be boiled down to a set of patterns albeit a complex one we can see these patterns at a simpler level in some music certainly for example you might have songs with an extremely repetitious beat something like this looped for three minutes straight it's feasible that a computer would learn from repetitive beat patterns and be able to reproduce a pop wherethey beat or what about a chord sequence you might have heard of the four chord song there are many different versions of this but it exposes that hundreds of pop songs use exactly the same four chords in similar or identical sequences so again there are clear patterns emerging if our a I was fed hundreds of melodies it might then easily be able to synthesize a beat a chord sequence and melodye at least to a cliched tired done before song this is perfectly within the rounds of the imagination in fact there's already software doing that kind of thing you might remember Microsoft song Smith that's essentially what it did he gave you a generic beat and a bad but functional chord sequence over your melody though that wasn't AI that was just a piece of software AI we hope will be capable of more complex and perhaps more human sounding music so again the idea is that you feed a computer lots of examples of the thing it needs to learn that computer then essentially teaches itself by collecting this data and then finding patterns and structures which are similar within that data they can then use these patterns to create something new so hypothetically we could train a machine to sound like JS Bach one of the great classical composers feed it some rules say years one two and three of love loves harmony and feed it a few hundred pieces of bark so that it can teach itself bark style in fact this is essentially what Google did in one of their doodle projects to celebrate a bark anniversary you could feed it to melody and it would harmonize it in the style of bark it does alright with simpler melodies you but struggles a bit with even slightly complex melodies [Music] doesn't really sound human and it's very far from bark maybe this task is more complex than it first seemed and that's only Barcia Corral's a relatively rule-bound clear-cut form which many music students in England that are expected to be able to write by ages 17 to 18 it seems like the computer understands barks harmony on a note by note basis but it hasn't developed a sense of overarching flow a sense of logical direction over a two-bar phrase and I imagine programming a machine to understand that overarching musical logic is a complex task and what about something more advanced than bark can a computer sound like Chopin listen to this example [Music] it's like lots of different imitations of Chopin but again there's nothing close to a sense of flow a sense of internal logic which leads us from one bar to the next in a satisfying and coherent way you compare that with the real thing and it's nothing close but Chopin's music is highly complex I can forgive a eye for not being there yet this is relatively early days so Barkin Chopin are a bit more complicated than they first seemed but maybe AI will get there in the future more on that later but what about pop music or genres which at least on the surface are a bit simpler than barking Chopin well I discovered that Amazon Web Services have recently released a new toy a WS deep composer as soon as I heard about this I rushed to check it out you simply feed it some music let's say ode to joy' [Music] and it's AI spews out this kind of thing [Music] random bizarre drum fills these funny high notes at the end [Music] not too shabby I mean it's just bizarre who thought this was ready for a public release it also seems like it hasn't really learned how to end a song yet [Music] then again from the computer science perspective at least it's produced something you could argue that it's amazing for it to be able to produce anything at all considering how complex a task this is but to us musicians it sounds like a bad joke a much better example would be either the new AI composer which has been fed around 30,000 scores through this it can write music for you under certain parameters you can choose whether you want it to be major or minor what kind of group you want to play it and how long you want it to be no indication of tempo key style apart from the incredibly broad parameter of classical from the TED talk you'd think that this was an extraordinarily real composer when I first heard its examples I thought oh crap we're going to be out of a job [Music] but then you watch the actual video of it being used and to be honest it's a little bit disappointing it seems like the examples used in the TED talk have almost certainly had a bit of human help have a listen to the kind of music it typically produces [Music] it really lacks soul and diversity and I think this is a significant problem I've said that AI will collect data find patterns and find structures which are similar within that data and they'll then use these patterns to create something new these aren't my words they're the words of Google software engineers the problem is when your goal is to find and produce patterns similar across thousands of different tracks you might come up with something as bland and lifeless as this some average common pattern which is technically functional but lacks any melodic interest at all precisely because it's not different enough because many of the songs which stick out the most to us are those which break pattern sequences those which don't conform to the bland most obvious patterns but which do something different take the wild lasting success of a band like Queen their songs aren't successful because they are the sum average of thousands of great songs their songs are successful because they are unique full of character and they seem to have soul their songs break away from common patterns rather than follow them more broadly we could read the whole history of Western music as being a sequence of breaking patterns as one generation of composers breaks away and defines themselves as being different from the previous generation how can a computer predict what the next trend will be trends of music are not statistically predictable in the way that stock market trends or even sports trends might be around 2009 for example dubstep suddenly blew up became hugely popular at a few years later it disappeared from the mainstream almost as fast as it appeared and in contemporary music the trend is often about sounds creating a fresh sound a fresh style we can give a computer certain parameters like harmony rhythm melody but can we teach it to develop a taste for sound and all the infinite subtleties of sound [Music] sound which is an inherent part of music this is a much more complex task and a complex philosophical problem what about the aesthetic embodied in Billy a lashus music to take one current style if you'd fed a computer the sum average of past songs from the 1960s to 2015 how on earth would it create a new fresh sound like this one when all its results are based on the past on top of all this there's the problem of having soul can a computer create music with soul of course as I suggested earlier a computer doesn't necessarily need to understand human emotion or expression it only needs to successfully mimic it but this might be more complicated than it seems let's take the example of literature first many of you have probably seen that hilarious example of the fake Harry Potter story written by AI they fed it all seven Harry Potter books and asked it to come up with its own here is an excerpt he saw Harry and immediately began to eat Hermione's family Ron's Ron shirt was just as bad as Ron himself if you two can't clump happily I'm going to get aggressive confessed the reasonable Hermione what about Ron magic offered Ron to Harry Ron was a loud slow and soft bird Harry did not like to think about Birds Death Eaters are on top of the castle Ron bleated quivering ron was going to be spiders he just was so what's interesting about this is that all these sentences are pretty much syntactically correct it reads like a hilariously absurdist story and yet in terms of human experience it just doesn't make sense and other sentences they almost leg dit but witches are not climbing it's kind of like no I'm Chomsky's famous sentence colorless green ideas sleep furiously syntactically that's a perfect sentence yet none of it makes sense it can't be both colorless and green ideas can't sleep furiously and sleep don't go together and so on and I think this raises an interesting point about AI on the one hand it's amazing that it's reached a point where it can spew out coherent sentences and it actually presents a fairly cohesive though ridiculous narrative that's kind of incredible and yet when the machine doesn't know what these words mean let alone what they mean in context it'll come out with sentences like not so handsome now said Harry as he dipped Hermione in hot sauce but we can go a step further than that how can a machine create something which resonates with the human experience when a machine doesn't know the human experience it only knows to follow and mimic patterns maybe a I will reach the point where it can tell coherent short stories which actually make sense without the nonsense but some of the best literature is that which can powerfully capture human experience one poetic tool for this is metaphor the device which creates an imaginary connection between two unlike things take my thoughts are stars I cannot fathom into constellations or we live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity or it is the east and Juliet is the Sun no Juliet is not literally the Sun and this metaphor is very different from the nonsense of the machine saying Ron was allowed slow and soft bird these metaphors work because they are written based on rich human experience because there are these complex and beautiful associations which combine and map on to each other and there's also a subtle difference between saying Juliet is like the Sun a simile and Juliet is the Sun a metaphor which poetically welds together ideas in beautiful combination it couldn't just be any two words though we know through human experience that thoughts and stars work especially well together or Juliet and son or the island of ignorance in the black seas of infinity we know these work because we are alive and we experience and these metaphors resonate with us because they are insightful they reveal something to us about life about meaning how could a machine possibly be expected to come up with a new powerful metaphor when it shares none of this experience of what it is to be alive and to perceive the world unless of course a I was to brute force writing a million metaphors the old 1000 monkeys on 1,000 typewriters it was the best of times it was the worst of times in which case any potent metaphor would simply be coincidence and not such a significant achievement but you might say music is simpler than literature it can be reduced to a series of patterns and this is where I disagree while maybe the computer could mimic the patterns of very simple songs the best music too has a strong resonance with human experience and with the human soul James May once did a BBC documentary on machines where he showed this piece a machine had been fed a bunch of Beethoven and it came up with this I think it's very good very realistic coherent there are things of moderate interest in that piece good job computer if there were no human hands involved to clean things up a bit and yet mr. may says that in the software emulates those patterns its able to produce a musical score but it's that really creative there were no new ideas in there no hint of emotion and that's important what is musical emotion this is a very challenging and necessarily subjective question you almost want to avoid bringing it up with a software engineer because there's a very real danger that it can't be codified that it's not just about patterns which recur across music but it truly is something more ineffable than that I've tried to explain this in a previous video on musical expression and how it resonates with our own human empathise and expressions and yet my argument for musical expression is only one of many and the moments of music that affect me the most might do nothing for you and vice-versa there is a subjectivity and also an ineffability about this problem which has led to huge amounts of musical philosophy books being written on exactly this problem I know that this moment of music emotionally affects me because somehow it connects with my empathise I feel its journey and crucially it resonates with my human experience and so in the same way that we need human experience to create resonant metaphors we need human experience to create and share truly expressive music lastly there's the moral issue I noticed underneath an ava video someone had commented as composers we don't compose music for others so much as for the joy of creating all art jobs are therefore sacred and I wish scientist would deliberately stop developing a eye for art every other job replace it away but not art because people don't live that much for being cab drivers and such but people live for art and taking that away the scientists would take not just money from composers or artists but their purposes in life I think that's very well said and yet based on what I've been exploring all of this video I think we're thankfully hopefully a very very long way away from that while AI might be able to replicate mimic predict and learn it doesn't share or even understand our essential human experience which flows through the most resonant works of art this video is sponsored by encoder it's an incredible library of sheet music straight to your tablet phone or laptop we're talking tens of thousands of pieces from over 100 publishers I love how intuitive the user interfaces to they curate playlists for different themes from Renaissance meditation to seeing sound to Nordic so it's really cool way to discover new music and explore an absolutely massive library they're offering free trials so definitely check it out at encoder com that's n kod a.com if you want to support my channels work or simply buy me a coffee to say thank you you can visit my patreon page at patreon.com forward slash inside the score I hope you enjoyed this video and thank you for watching you [Music]

Channel: undefined

Views: 54,757

Rating: 4.8668375 out of 5

Keywords: A.I., Artificial Intelligence, Music, Robots, Robot, Machine, Machines, Write Music, Composer, AIVA, AWS, DeepComposer, Bach, Chopin, SongSmith

Id: Mxa6k3AgNqs

Length: 20min 5sec (1205 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020

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