From Maestro to Machine: How AI will Change Music
Written by Tanisha Thatte
Our lives have a soundtrack. Play an old favorite song and instantly it will take you back in time. Maybe this was the song that you played when you drove to work every day, or when you danced in your kitchen while cooking dinner, or when you had your first heartbreak. These songs have been created by master musicians, the result of a combination of innate talent and countless hours of practice. The creators of the music we listen to play quite an important role in our lives. You hear their voices, their instruments, and their compositions every day. But what if the great song you heard on the radio tomorrow wasn’t crafted from the mind of a maestro, but rather from
the programmed mechanisms of a machine?
Machine-made music isn’t actually a new idea. The first person to suggest the notion of machine-made music was Ada Lovelace. Using the Babbage Engine (designed by the inventor of computers Charles Babbage) she wrote that “[one] might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent”. One hundred years later, Lejaren Hiller and
Leonard Isaacson, composed the Illiac Suite. Using the Illiac I computer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (both composers were professors there) they used standards of music theory to compose the piece. Each movement of the suite corresponds to four experiments.

Today, there are several ongoing projects attempting to create new music through a variety of algorithms. IBM’s Watson Beat listens to existing music while scanning social media trends to create new work. Sony’s Computer Science Laboratory’s Flow Machines tweak an existing musical style by adapting it to a new composition using a melody and harmony database.
Jukedeck, a UK based startup, is an AI system using neural networks to compose original music. Speaking with Billboard magazine, Jukedeck’s founder Patrick Stobbs says “In five years, we want to offer music that responds to where you are, what you are doing and how you are feeling.”
For traditional composers, the notion of AI composing music is something they might have to get used to. Some may say machine-made music is a quick cheap fix, something that can never sound as good as the real thing. But, then again, they said the same thing about electric instruments, which are now staples in most popular songs. Although machine-made music may
not be here quite yet, it is coming. With it will come a wave of new genres, sounds, and symphonies and most likely, it will shake up the soundtrack to our lives.
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About the Author
Tanisha is a founding member of Humans For AI, a non-profit focused on building a more diverse workforce for the future leveraging AI technologies. Learn more about us and join us as we embark on this journey to make a difference!
