New artificial intelligence robot creates its own music

Washington : In a first, scientists have developed an artificial intelligence robot that can create its own music inspired by the works of musicians like Beethoven and Lady Gaga. The robot with four arms and eight sticks writes and plays its own compositions on a marimba, using a database of well-known pop, classical and jazz artists.

Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology in the US fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs - from Beethoven to the Beatles to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis. They worked with the robot named 'Shimon' for seven years, enabling it to listen to music played by humans and improvise over pre-composed chord progressions.

Shimon is now a solo composer generating the melody and harmonic structure on its own, researchers said. "Shimon's compositions represent how music sounds and looks when a robot uses deep neural networks to learn everything it knows about music from millions of human-made segments," said Mason Bretan, a PhD student at Georgia Tech.