Yandex creates music composing artificial intelligence

Programmers of Yandex has created an unusual neural network which is able to compose music and create it in the style of those works, written by famous composers of the past. The results of the work and description of this artificial intelligence system was published in the electronic library arXiv.org.

“Last year I met Andrew Sebrant, head of marketing services of the company Yandex. In the process of communication with the team of Yandex were born the new ideas, and he proposed to develop a high-concept opening next conference YaC with live music and technology based on the ideas of Alexander Scriabin, which this year marks 145 years,” says Maria Chernova, a composer and music expert.

In recent years, thanks to the development of mathematics and the growth of computing power of computers, scientists have had the ability to create complex neural networks, artificial intelligence systems, able to perform non-trivial tasks and even to “think” creatively, by creating new models of art and technology.

For example, last year alone, scientists have created AI that can beat human “neproschityvaemym” the ancient Chinese game of Go, to find the most important events in the history of the Newspapers, to write scripts for computer games and paint pictures and a video at the van Gogh, and draw their own pictures.

Alexey Tikhonov, Ivan Yamshchikov, programmers from Yandex, added the accomplishments of artificial intelligence and music, creating a neural network that can analyze music and to write their own songs, not like them.

This artificial intelligence system, like many other projects of this kind, consists of many interrelated layers «of neurons. Each of them parses simple elements that make up the music of the great composers, and has memory, allowing them to consider in the analysis and «writing» music that they did in the recent past, and how often they communicated with other neurons and network layers.

In order to turn this system into a real composer, Tikhonov and coachmen «fed» her a great number of works by Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven and other great composers, including Scriabin. A total of AI analyzed about 4 gigabytes of MIDI files, e-sets of «notes» that leaves about 600 hours of music before it acquired the ability to independently compose music.

Maria confirmed the similarity of pieces of music of the neural network with the creativity of the composer»the hero of the day». Using this AI, the programmers of Yandex and Chernova produced a piece of music in the style of Scriabin, which was performed at the opening of the YaC 2017, annual conference of Yandex, to the accompaniment of a chamber orchestra. The action was accompanied by visuals, light and graphics which also created machine — they obey the music, and the party of the theremin accurately reproduces color according to the color scale of the discoverer of music.

Russian composer and pianist Alexander Scriabin born January 6, 1872 in Moscow. He is the first composer who used color and light when creating his works that created the color table mapping certain keys. In 1910, for Symphony orchestra enlarged, piano, organ, choir, light Scriabin wrote “the Poem of fire,” which is considered one of the most significant of his creations.