Machine learning is now entering the field of music and art. A recent example is from Magenta, the creative research team of Google is Piano Genie, which is an AI program that allows you to improvise immediately on the piano with 8 buttons.
The team who is responsible for Piano Genie got the inspiration from Guitar Hero, which is actually a game that simplifies the process of playing the instrument. They actually do not want people to just click along with the pre-written songs; they want them to build the melody pieces on their own.
To make this happen, they created an AI-based program with the use of a big dataset of classic piano music; to teach them so that they can make a decision on what notes to follow, just like the predictive text functionality of your phone.
An Intern, Chris Donahue, Google Magenta, one of the members of the team, shares with The Verge, “I genuinely expected to design a device that we can offer to an individual who is a novice in this field, and with this device, they can develop their own music with the intention they have.”
Donahue describes that numerous musical projects based on AI create complete melodies with just a single starting chord or note. Piano Genie is quite contrasted in that manner, it predicts note by note, offering the user a feeling of having control over it.
However, this was technically a challenge to reduce the latency to make each note promptly ready to play, but it as well develops a novel feeling for the one who plays, as said by Donahue, who has been playing the instrument for 2 decades.