Sony's Artificial Intelligence Writes Pop Song

Researchers have been pushing the boundaries of music and Artificial Intelligence for some time, designing programs that "create" music after being given sets of instructions and analyzing existing compositions. Up until recently, those pieces were classical or jazz, but for the first time, Sony's Flow Machines AI created a pop song, titled "Daddy's Car," in the style of The Beatles.

Scientists fed the software massive amounts of lead sheets from various composers, including jazz, pop, Broadway, and Brazilian styles.

Sony's blog explains in more detail:

"How is it done? What did the machines do, and what did the artist?

1) We set up a database called LSDB. It contains about 13000 leadsheet from a lot of different styles and composers (mainly jazz and pop about also a lot of Brazilian, Broadway and other music styles).

2) The human composer (in this case Benoît Carré, but we are experimenting with other musicians as well) selected a style and generated a leadsheet (melody + harmony) with a system called FlowComposer. For Daddy’s Car, Carré selected as style “The Beatles."

3) With yet another system called Rechord the human musician matched some audio chunks from audio recordings of other songs to the generated leadsheets.

4) Then the human musician finished the production and mixing."

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