In this TED Talk, Pierre Barreau gives us a short glimpse of what the future of music could look like. Have you ever wondered if we could possibly “run out” of original music? Could we get to a point at which all possible combinations of notes that sound good together have been played? And with the recent surge in AI development, is it possible for even our musicians to be replaced by computers? The development of AIVA, an artificial intelligence with the capability of writing full orchestral pieces, poses these questions to the world. An AI could theoretically generate music better we can – by training it on pieces composed by great and well respected musicians, it could become the “perfect” music composer.
However, current music-generating AIs aren’t quite there yet – but they could be quite close. For applications in which the music isn’t the main focal point – for example, as soundtracks in movies, AI-generated music can do the job quite well. For example, this piece of music created by AIVA would fit right in to a cinematic scene in a movie or an RPG video game:
Is art created by an artificial intelligence still art? Will artists ever lose their jobs to AIs? As technology becomes more and more integrated into our lives, these are questions that artists will eventually need to ponder.
