Can improvisation be looped? We use Piano Genie for real time improvisation of piano music with a pre-recorded looped input. Piano Genie is a creative AI application developed as a part of Google’s Magenta project that maps an input consisting of 8 units to 88 keys of a piano in real time. It is based on a technology called LSTM (Long short-term memory), a type of artificial neural network for learning and recognizing patterns in sequences of data. After training, Piano Genie can predict the next note based on user input along with the previously played musical content. However, because of this second condition, the same input can produce a completely different output at each playback.
We generated several short sequences that are played as input in a loop. As a result, the application will continue to create new outputs despite the same input.
Project Credits:
- Piano Genie: Chris Donahue, Ian Simon, Sander Dieleman (Magenta, 2018)
Biographies:
Ali Nikrang is a key researcher & artist at Ars Electronica Futurelab. He has his background in both computer science (Johannes Kepler University in Linz) and classical music (composition and piano performance, Mozarteum University in Salzburg).
Michael Lahner is a music producer and synthesizer player, who loves to improvise and is based in Vienna.
