Artificial musician builds new melodies without music theory

A deep-learning algorithm developed by EPFL scientists can generate melodies that imitate a given style of music. The 'deep artificial composer' could one day generate convincing music for multiple instruments in real time, with applications ranging from video games to helping composers in the creative process. The 'deep artificial composer', or 'DAC' for short, generates brand-new melodies that imitate traditional folk music of Irish or Klezmer origin. It does so without plagiarising already existing ones, since melodies it writes are as original as those produced by a human composer. The results were presented in April at this year's edition of the Evostar conference. The DAC actually produces musical scores of melodies, symbolic music written using notation, and does not generate audio files. 'The deep artificial composer can produce complete melodies, with a beginning and an end, that are completely novel and that share features that we relate to style,' says EPFL scientists Florian Colombo who developed the artificial intelligence under the guidance of Wulfram Gerstner, director of the Computational Neuroscience Laboratory.