Most popular music today uses a computer as the central instrument. A single musician is often selecting the instruments, programming the drum loops, composing the melodies, and mixing the track to get the right overall atmosphere.

With so much work to do on each song, popular musicians need to simplify–the result is that pop music today consists of simple melodies without much chord progression.

Magenta is a project out of Google Brain to design algorithms that learn how to generate art and music. One goal of Magenta is to advance the state of the art in machine intelligence for music and art generation. Another goal is to build a community of artists, coders, and machine learning researchers who can collaborate.

Engineers today are happy to outsource server management to a cloud service provider. Similarly, a musician can use Magenta for creation of a melody, so she can focus on other aspects of a song, such as instrumentation.

Doug Eck is a research scientist at Google. In today’s episode, we explore the Magenta project and the future of music.

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