When Bob Dylan said, “Creativity has much to do with experience, observation and imagination, and if any one of those key elements is missing, it doesn’t work,” he was likely talking about human musicians.
But now, a growing crop of programmers are building sophisticated songwriting tools that use artificial intelligence, or AI, to assist aspiring composers. Some of the computer programs can create entire pieces of music from scratch, but the results might not be as captivating as Dylan’s “Tangled Up in Blue” or “Hurricane
.”
Vibert Thio, a self-described “poetic technologist” from Taiwan, created an interactive songwriting website powered by machine learning called the Lo-Fi Player, which came online earlier this year.