Magneta, a Google research team, has developed Piano Genie, an artificial intelligence-powered interface that lets anyone improvise on the piano using just eight buttons. The researchers were inspired by Konami’s Guitar Hero, a rhythm game, and rather than have users play actual songs, they wanted them to create their own melodies in real-time, which is made possible by an AI trained on a large data bank of classical piano music, thus enabling the AI to predict what notes follow each other. Continue reading for three more videos and additional information.
“The machine learning side of the Piano Genie is built from a few common AI elements. The main component is a recurrent neural network, a type of program that’s particularly good at learning to mimic sequential data, such as writing and music. This neural net was fed with a dataset of piano music taken from an international competition. This data was particularly useful, as the competition records all performances in a file format that preserves not only the notes, but also velocity,” reports The Verge.
