A song composed by artificial intelligence in the style of the Beatles

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The “first ever” songs to be composed by an AI are a little hard to pin down, but would be at least thirty years old by now by any reasonable definition. When it comes to certain topics (notably AI & brain-computer interfaces), journalists have an annoying tendency to claim that whatever a researcher is doing is “the first”, which gets more annoying when in some cases the same outlet has been claiming it for different minor variations of the same ideas every six months since the 50s.

(Sunspring is not the first screenplay written by an AI; an AI was demonstrated in 1957 that wrote screenplays, and a documentary on it aired on television that year. The first brain-controlled wheelchairs started showing up in the 80s at the latest. And, David Cope was showing off symphony-length compositions by neural nets in the late 90s. AI composition of music has gotten easy enough that a half-competent web developer can whip up an AI composer in an hour. Come on, guys.)

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ugh. Ringo must be rolling over in his grave…

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ETA @john_ohno beat me to it!

Scientists at SONY CSL Research Laboratory have created the first-ever entire songs composed by Artificial Intelligence

Indeed, that’s a completely bogus claim, as anybody involved in this area of music surely knows. Lots of music is procedurally generated. And composition like this based upon stylistic traits analyzed from a particular artist has been done at least since the 1980s. See the work of David Cope for nearly thirty years of examples. His papers and books on the subject are quite interesting.

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Reminds me more of Summerteeth era Wilco.

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Radiolab did a great episode on the topic w/ David Cope (but don’t they always): http://www.radiolab.org/story/91515-musical-dna/

This particular project doesn’t seem like the greatest example of the process… As mentioned above, the quality’s not the strongest, and in listening to Benoit Carré’s stuff, it sounds like maybe more human composer is leaking across than the AI generated label would have you believe. https://benoitcarre.wordpress.com/

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If by “in the style of the Beatles,” they mean “in the style of a discarded XTC demo,” then sure. Otherwise…

EDIT: Annnnnd…I see that someone (a couple of someones, actually) already made an XTC connection. That’s what I get for not reading the comments before posting.

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The tune is catchy enough, but the lyrics fail the Turing test. They sound like English might sound to a non-speaker.

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So… did you like it?

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Somewhere, a cold chill just went down Jeff Lynne’s spine.

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Yeah. That’s three of us.

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Going with a Douglas Adamsy Almost but not quite completely unlike … here…

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Not to mention Mozart, Bach, etc, all of whom were into a bit of procedural generation.

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I’m sure all the young AI will think this fits well within their pleasure interpretation parameters. me, not so much.

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John - that new music guy at the last GenArt meetup studied under Cope. @popobawa4u you’ve gotta come up to New Haven sometime.

On an almost unrelated note, one of my numerous cousins will most likely be coming to town for grad work on soft robotics.

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That ain’t the Beatles I know and love. Air Supply?

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I apparently was not alone thinking this sounded more like Andy Partridge’s music with crappy mashed-together Beatles lyrics.

Andy Partridge, or some weird ELO/NRBQ hybrid doing a tribute to Andy Partridge.

Either way, the music was weird but not necessarily bad, and the lyrics were just bad.

My phone writes better poetry

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Yeah or XTC’s side project The Dukes Of Stratosphear.

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Thanks Boing Boing.

Now when ever I want to crystallise the difference between human appreciation of art and everything that can be quantified about it, I have a YouTube clip to refer to!

Edit: Wait, wait, wait!

“Daddy’s Car” is composed in the style of The Beatles. French composer Benoît Carré arranged and produced the songs, and wrote the lyrics.

So what did the AI do? In 2016 when we listen to recorded music, what is the artistic input beyond arrangement, production, lyrics and (presumably) performance? The AI wrote the melody?

Also now I definitely think it sounds like Air.

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You win!

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You’re at home one day and feeling a bit peckish but there are no leftovers so you decide to make a dish using a little bit of everything in the kitchen.
This song sounds like that shit would taste like.

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