Is artificial intelligence the composer of the 21st century?
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The examples of music created by artificial intelligence multiply, which makes us wonder: how far will it go?
In Johann Sebastian Bach's latest 'birthday', Google presented a fun doodle with which it celebrated the anniversary of the German composer. The curious thing about this doodle was that it allowed the user to compose a melodic line to which three other voices were added to form a Bach-like choir.
Leer en español: ¿Es la inteligencia artificial la compositora del siglo XXI?
This was possible thanks to the artificial intelligence (AI) applied by the American company that analyzed more than 300 works by Bach to be able to harmonize the compositions of the users in the style of the legendary composer. With this small sample, the AI takes more and more prominence in the world of music.
Music in any style
The advancement of technology has endangered jobs around the world, especially those related to mechanical work that can be automated or carried out by robots. It has been assured that the only jobs that will survive will be those that are related to creativity, as in the arts, which can not be imitated by technology.
Now, the AI challenges this hypothesis and begins to develop more often music created from technology with little human intervention and, in some cases, without it.
Although the AI does not go to the conservatory, it does need to learn constantly and it does it through its machine learning systems, according to the newspaper La Vanguardia. That is, it learns from the constant analysis of available material, so that, by having a greater amount of material, it can generate content with greater detail, depth, and fidelity than what a human would do.
For example, in 2016 a team of engineers from Sony presented the song "Daddy's Car", created by the artificial intelligence system Flow Machines from the analysis of 13 thousand songs, including the music of The Beatles. Although the AI created the music, it was needed human intervention from a human composer for the final result, T13 noted.
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The 'unfinished' Symphony by Schubert
The technological giant Huawei presented in 2019 a 'finished' version of the 'unfinished' Symphony by composer Franz Schubert, which originally consists of two movements, so it is traditionally considered that it was never finished.
For this reason, Lucas Cantor, Emmy winning composer, 'collaborated' with the Huawei AI system to build two more movements for the symphony. The newspaper El Universal reported on the premiere of the 'complete' symphony in Latin America under the baton of the director Alondra de la Parra.
Will the time come when human intervention is not necessary?
It is difficult to think that music creators allow something to displace them, but the music industry has already allowed the entry of AI in many areas, not only in the composition. For example, technology can be used for editing, analysis, interpretation, among others.
In this regard the Mexican director told Prensa Libre after the concert that "the human being is irreplaceable, as well as his talent and imagination, AI is a tool to do better what we already know how to do, not to replace us".
For the critically acclaimed pop industry, whose music is classified as repetitive and not very creative, the AI could allow production of more musical hits generated by technology. The mass production of this type of music is one of the hallmarks of the industry. For Pascal Pilon from Landr, a technology company specializing in mastering software, nobody wants to listen to music generated by a robot, because for him music tells stories, but it is likely that at some point it will be difficult or impossible for something to be composed by technology and not for a human.
LatinAmerican Post | Luis Ángel Hernandez
Translated from "¿Es la inteligencia artificial la compositora del siglo XXI?
