Run For Your Lives, 'Coz A.I. Has Composed A Beatles-style Pop Tune

Burn your smartphones and head for the hills, because we've taken science too far and now we have computer programs that can compose palatable, psychedelic pop tunes, with only a little assistance from us squishy meatbags.

It's as terrifying an achievement as it is impressive, consequently standing to reason that the final collapse of human civilisation is basically around the corner; yes, in the next age, when our descendants are holding fight night at the Thunderdome and tearing along the Fury Road, they will look back with fear and scepticism about our era of scientific hubris, when we so casually imbued scientists at the Sony CSL Research Laboratory with the power to create artificial intelligence sophisticated enough to actually learn different genres of music based on a massive database of songs.

As ElectronicBeats.net notes, the researchers explain the system, FlowMachines, as one that exploits "unique combinations of style transfer, optimization and interaction techniques … [to compose] novel songs in many styles".

So far, the program has composed two songs that have been released to the public: Daddy's Car — which is "composed in the style of The Beatles", and was arranged and produced by French composer Benoit Carre, who also "wrote" the lyrics using another program called Rechord — and Mr Shadow, also arranged/produced by Carre, "composed in the style of American songwriters such as Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Cole Porter".

Yes, to be perfectly fair, there is still a significant amount of human intervention between the initial step of FlowMachines writing the music and the final, recorded, arranged and otherwise-meddled-with song, but still — it's a slippery slope from here, is all we're saying.

Give both tracks — which are taken from entire albums composed by A.I., planned for release in 2017 — a listen below, and read through a breakdown of which components are human-made and which are all the machine.

Find out more about FlowMachines at the makers' website.

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 lead sheets 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 lead sheet (melody + harmony) with a system called FlowComposer. For Daddy’s Car, Carré selected as style “the Beatles” and for Mr. Shadow he selected a style that we call “American songwriters” (which contains songs by composers like Cole Porter, Gershwin, Duke Ellington, etc).

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

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

Source: FlowMachines