Composing Bach Chorales Using Deep Learning
GOTO Amsterdam 2017

Tuesday Jun 13
11:10 –
12:00
Veilingzaal

Composing Bach Chorales Using Deep Learning

Slides:


This video is also available in the GOTO Play video app! Download it to enjoy offline access to our conference videos while on the move.

Available in Google Play Store or Available in Apple App Store




Can musical creativity, something believed to be deeply human, be codified into an algorithm?

While most music theorists are hesitant to claim a "correct" algorithm for composing music like Bach, recent advances in machine learning and computational musicology may help us reach an answer.

In this talk, we describe BachBot: an artificial intelligence which uses deep learning and long short term memory (LSTM) to compose music in the style of Bach. We train BachBot on all known Bach chorale harmonisations and carry out the largest musical Turing test to date. Our results show that the average listener can distinguish BachBot from real Bach only 5% better than random guessing, suggesting that algorithmic composition of Bach chorales is more closed (as a result of BachBot) than open a problem.

Prerequisite attendee experience level: advanced