When music meets AI, magical things can happen – and by that we don’t just mean the Bösendorfer grand piano that plays by itself as if enchanted.
With MuseNet, OpenAI has created a deep neural network that can create musical compositions with various instruments. But it does not compose like a human would: it tries to find out what “building block” should best be used next in a composition after being trained with hundreds of thousands of MIDI files. From this pool of data, the artificial intelligence decides for itself what fits best. Combined with the self-playing capabilities of the Bösendorfer 290 Imperial CEUS computer grand these compositions – like this newly composed piece in the style of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach – create an eerie and magical experiment in humanity’s relationship to art and performance.
