Can Robots Create New Music?

Getting robots to play existing pieces of music is as easy as programming them with what to do at what interval of time. However is it possible for a music playing robot to actually come up with a new piece of music all by itself? That’s what researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology are trying to find out.

Shimon is a marimba playing robot with four arms and eight sticks. As part of a science experiment to see if Shimon could use deep learning and artificial intelligence to write new music, researchers fed it over five thousand songs ranging from Beethoven to Lada Gaga. Ph.D. student Mason Bretan also added close to two million motifs, riffs and licks of music to the robot’s repertoire.

Mason Bretan says that after Shimon is given 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 robot has composed two pieces of music that are thirty seconds long. Both performances can be seen on YouTube. This is the first time that a robot has generated melody and harmonic structure on its own. Is this the future of music?