Robot plays, composes music in Georgia Tech lab

A robot is writing and playing music in a lab at Georgia Tech.

A story by Jason Maderer on the school’s website explains how the marimba-playing robot with four arms and eight sticks composes works using artificial intelligence and deep learning.

According to the article, researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs — from Beethoven to the Beatles to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis — and more than two million motifs, riffs and licks of music. Aside from giving the machine a seed, or the first four measures to use as a starting point, no humans are involved in either the composition or the performance of the music.

The first two compositions by the robot Shimon are roughly 30 seconds in length.

Ph.D. student Mason Bretan is the man behind the machine. He’s worked with Shimon for seven years, enabling it to “listen” to music played by humans and improvise over pre-composed chord progressions. Now Shimon is a solo composer for the first time, generating the melody and harmonic structure on its own.

“Once Shimon learns the four measures we provide, it creates its own sequence of concepts and composes its own piece,” said Bretan in the article. “Shimon’s compositions represent how music sounds and looks when a robot uses deep neural networks to learn everything it knows about music from millions of human-made segments.”

Shimon was created by Bretan’s advisor, Gil Weinberg, director of Georgia Tech’s Center for Music Technology.

Bretan says this is the first time a robot has used deep learning to create music. And unlike its days of improvising, when it played monophonically, Shimon is able to play harmonies and chords

For much more on Shimon, visit http://www.news.gatech.edu/2017/06/13/robot-uses-deep-learning-and-big-data-write-and-play-its-own-music

This story was originally published June 14, 2017 at 5:47 PM with the headline "Robot plays, composes music in Georgia Tech lab."