Google’s AI Duet Sounds Like Music To Our Ears

Google is very serious about their venture into the world of artificial intelligence right now. While most people know their DeepMind AI solution, the company is experimenting with other projects as well. AI Duet, a music-playing piano bot, will look at keyboard melody input and try to match it within the sandboxed environment. Quite an intriguing concept that deserves to get more attention.

AI Duet Is Quite An Impressive Tool

It is evident Google is on a mission to help consumers familiarize themselves with artificial intelligence solutions. While DeepMind is nearly off-limits to everyone in the world, AI Duet is widely available for testing. Using a piano bot to showcase how AI works, is a great way to get people acquainted with disruptive technology.  It is also another example of how the technology giant sees a bright future for this technology.

The way AI Duet works is as follows: it interprets the notes a user transmits through a computer keyboard. Once the input is collected, all information is run through a neural network which is based on machine learning. The neural net will look for rhythmic and melodic patterns it can identify. Moreover, it is capable of understanding such concepts as timing and staying in key from a different perspective than the human ear.

To put this into perspective, our ears tell us if music stays in key. The neural net, on the other hand, can look at it from a hard data perspective, without even requiring a command to specifically look for this type of information. Once all of the data processing is completed, AI Duet will output a musical melody that should match the user’s input very closely. It may still be off a few times, but its machine learning capabilities will allow AI Duet to become smarter as more time progresses.

Do not be mistaken in thinking AI Duet is a tool to help people become musical wonders overnight. Creating a summer hit tune is completely out of the question, albeit the end result may be to people’s liking regardless. There is a certain randomness associated with the AI Duet output for the time being.

Putting all of these “created’ pieces of music into a song will be virtually impossible, which is not necessarily a bad thing. This tool is not designed to create musicians overnight, but rather to show how artificial intelligence is capable of learning a lot of different things when used in different environments. It is an intriguing concept nonetheless, albeit it may never become a piano maestro in the foreseeable future.

Artificial intelligence can stimulate creative activity in multiple ways. Music is just one possible avenue worth exploring. Google has other musical AI experiments it is working on right now, including an app that raps about what it sees through your phone’s camera. Bringing free-to-use AI tools to the public is definitely the right way to go for Google.

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