Google is out with a working, interactive version of AI Duet — an application which lets you have a virtual duet involving a piano with the computer, where you press any note, tune or melody and the computer responds back in kind with playing something different.
The app was created by Yotam Mann of the Google Creative Lab in New York, and was released in November during a company event at San Francisco. It was later open sourced by Yotam in order to see what other people do with it. However, to get the code running by itself is little tedious — and something of an impossible task for folks with no coding background. Google has simplified the task and its app has been designed so that the keyboard of your computer and the screen of your smartphone can be used for playing the piano.
The app was awarded with the “best demo” award at the 31st annual Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in Barcelona in December. So, its worth a try.
AI Duet is largely dependent on Mann’s open source audio library Tone.js for its functioning. But the trickier task of what must be responded for a give tone is done by Magenta, a library built on Google’s TensorFlow open-source framework for deep learning — a kind of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which trains the neural networks on data and then feeds them with new data for making new deductions of their own.
Just like its gigantic counterparts Microsoft and Facebook, Google too is making use of deep learning in its services like Android Wear and Google Translate. It is also trying to introduce people with the potential of deep learning technology. Its Magenta program for instance, was launched with the goal of spreading awareness among programmers.
In an interview, Doug Eck, a Google research scientist working on Magenta, told VentureBeat:
Someone like my mom, who’s not technically savvy — she can actually play with this thing. I can’t wait to show this to her. That’s seriously an important outcome for AI Duet — to understand what these models are able to do.
Mann has also been a part of AI Experiments like Birds Sound, Giorgio Cam and Infinite Drum Machine, but AI Duet is way better than them in many aspects. It is a perfect amalgamation of human creativity and Artificial Intelligence.
AI Duet compliments your keyboard tunes by responding with many or one notes time to time, the notes are always fresh and surprising. In this context Eck says:
I think surprise is one of the most important things you can talk about if you’re doing generative media. If everything is predictable, it’s just not that interesting.
This is just the initial phase and the application has a lot more to offer. But as they say, the beginning is the most important part of a job, and this AI is having a perfect beginning. You can try the app out right here.
