Google's Magenta Project will soon be able to get artificial intelligence (AI) to create art.
The Magenta Project is a part of Google Brain group and the project includes only six researchers. However, the project will also invite academics to work on creative machines. Project Magenta will use the company's open-source AI platform called TensorFlow in creating algorithms that can generate music.
Douglas Eck, who is a researcher at Google Brain, said that during the four-day music and technology festival called Moogfest in Durham, North Carolina, the project wants to move from music to videos and then to visual arts.
"There's a couple of things that got me wanting to form Magenta, and one of them was seeing the completely, frankly, astonishing improvements in the state of the art [of creative deep learning]. And I wanted to demystify this a little bit," says Eck.
"I'm primarily looking at how to use so-called 'generative' machine learning models to create engaging media. Additionally, I'm working on how to bring other aspects of the creative process into play," added Eck.
Eck says that Project Magenta also aims at creating tools, which will help its own group as well as other researchers explore the creative potential of computer systems. Google is expected to launch Magenta on June 1 and some of its tools will also be available to the public.
The first tool that the Magenta team plans to launch is a program for importing MIDI music files into TensorFlow. The program will help train computer systems on music knowledge.
Adam Roberts, another researcher of the Magenta Project, suggests that the team will add regular updates to a blog. During Moogfest, Roberts also demonstrated a digital synthesizer program, where an AI listens to musical notes and then plays back a melody from those notes.
The project will help in regularly creating new music. However, Eck suggests that even though people may start listening to computer-generated music, many will still prefer listening to human-created music.
Eck also revealed that a Magenta app may be launched soon, which will show visual art and music created by the Magenta Project.
Photo: Robert Scoble | Flickr
