Looking Outward 01

One cool project that really inspires me is the Bach Harmonizer Doodler. As some may already know, it is an online application that lets you input any two bar melody of your choice and it will harmonize it using Bach’s chorales as reference.

This project was made by the Google Magenta and Google PAIR teams so there were likely many people who worked on it. To create it, they used a machine learning software to teach the AI to recognize patterns in between 306 of Bach’s chorales.

Google was likely inspired to do this by other AI-based “mini-game” projects, one that comes to mind is Akinator in which by you answering minimal questions, the software can guess any character you are thinking of.

While the software of the harmonizer is still far from perfect (if you have taken a harmony course at CMU you know), it is a cool step in computer generated music. As a composer myself, the concept of AI writing its own music is a little frightening but also extremely fascinating. This project inspires me to work harder at my art as to not be outdone by the growth of software such as this.