Yandex programmers have created an unusual neural network that can compose music and create it in the style of those works written by famous composers of the past. The results of the work and a description of this artificial intelligence system were published in the arXiv.org electronic library.
“Last year I met Andrey Sebrant, head of the marketing services department at Yandex. In the process of communicating with the Yandex team, new ideas began to be born, and Andrey suggested developing an extraordinary concept for the opening of the next YaC conference with live music and technologies based on the ideas of Alexander Scriabin, who turns 145 this year, says Maria Chernova, composer and music expert …
In recent years, thanks to the development of mathematics and the growth of computing power of computers, scientists have the opportunity to create complex neural networks, artificial intelligence systems capable of performing non-trivial tasks and even "thinking" creatively, creating new examples of art and technology.
For example, in the last year alone, scientists have created AI capable of playing the "uncountable" ancient Chinese game of Go, searching the newspapers for the most important events in history, writing scripts for computer games and coloring photographs and videos like Van Gogh, and drawing their own pictures.
Alexey Tikhonov and Ivan Yamshchikov, programmers from Yandex, have added music to the list of achievements of artificial intelligence, creating a neural network capable of analyzing musical works and writing their own compositions that are not similar to them.
This artificial intelligence system, like many other projects of this kind, consists of many layers of neurons connected to each other. Each of them analyzes the simple elements that make up the music of great composers, and has a memory that allows them to take into account when analyzing and "composing" music what they did in the recent past, and how often they communicated with other neurons and layers of the network …
In order to turn this system into a real composer, Tikhonov and Yamshchikov “fed” it a huge number of works by Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven and other great composers, including Scriabin. In total, the AI analyzed about 4 gigabytes of MIDI files, electronic sets of "notes", which leaves about 600 hours of music before it acquired the ability to independently compose music.
Maria confirmed the similarity of the pieces of the musical neural network with the work of the "hero of the day." light and graphics in which are also created by a machine - they obey the music, and the theremin party faithfully reproduces the colors according to the color scale of the discoverer of color music.
Promotional video:
Russian composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin was born on January 6, 1872 in Moscow. He is the first composer to use color and light music when creating his works, who created a table of correspondence of colors to certain tonalities. In 1910, for an expanded symphony orchestra, piano, organ, choir, light, Scriabin wrote The Poem of Fire, which is considered one of his most significant creations.