It brings this recent story to mind: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13033299
Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
21–30 of 115 posts
Re: Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
#22Is it just me or it really sounds like a randomly generated chord progression that barely makes any musical sense?
Oh, that's just because the input image wasn't good enough.
Re: Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
#23It kind of feels like a five-year-old trying to make a song. Which seems good - now they only need to improve the mechanisms and who know, maybe we'll get to the point when it's a ten-year-old?
Instead of five, don't you mean "two to three"? And under that comparison, isn't it scary how much it does sound that way? Like a kid who hears words together but don't know what they mean yet? (and doesn't really get the cultural things around it.) To me it sounds like a quite musical 2-3 year old stringing words together. Doesn't it strike anyone else that way? These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We…
> These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We know that. It's scary.
I'll believe it when I see it.
Your post has just a bit too much futurologist science fantasy wishful thinking in it.
Re: Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
#24It kind of feels like a five-year-old trying to make a song. Which seems good - now they only need to improve the mechanisms and who know, maybe we'll get to the point when it's a ten-year-old?
Instead of five, don't you mean "two to three"? And under that comparison, isn't it scary how much it does sound that way? Like a kid who hears words together but don't know what they mean yet? (and doesn't really get the cultural things around it.) To me it sounds like a quite musical 2-3 year old stringing words together. Doesn't it strike anyone else that way? These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We…
> the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full human mind is less than 700 MB uncompressed
Actually those 700MB are compressed, in a way so sophisticated that we don't really know how to uncompress it yet - or whether it's even possible without the external resources our planet provides. And keep in mind that those 700MB only describe how to prepare the basic concept of the brain, whose memory is then packed with information we get from the culture.
Re: Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
#25I'm not sure that Christmas songs generally use the blues scale, I wonder what made them choose that for the melody?
I suspect it's an easy way to get something that won't sound completely dissonant, especially because you can use the same blues scale over multiple chords.
I can see the logic behind that, but without any sort of tension/release between the melody and chords, it still sounds just as dissonant to my ears.
Re: Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of five, don't you mean "two to three"? And under that comparison, isn't it scary how much it does sound that way? Like a kid who hears words together but don't know what they mean yet? (and doesn't really get the cultural things around it.) To me it sounds like a quite musical 2-3 year old stringing words together. Doesn't it strike anyone else that way? These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We…
> These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We know that. It's scary. I'll believe it when I see it. Your post has just a bit too much futurologist science fantasy wishful thinking in it.
You sound like some of the kids I teach. All 17 - 18 year old kids have phones and check them at least every 5 minutes. I mentioned that it'll be weird when they are wearing some sort of augmented reality glasses and teachers won't be able to tell if students are concentrating or reading reddit.
The kids all said "That'll never happen." as if technology is stuck where we are today. They were astounded when I told them that ten years ago, I never saw a phone in a classroom. So from my perspective we went from no phones, to big phones, to little dumb phones, to little connected computers... it's no stretch to think that soon they will be glasses mounted or project some sort of holograph into the eyeball. Version 2 of Microsoft HoloLens will be cool, v3 will be tiny, v4 will be mounted inside glasses for sure.
The same with AI. A few years ago I couldn't talk to my computer. Today I do it all the time. Last week I had to remember passwords, today my computer recognises me and logs me in.
AI is here and it's getting better and from my point of view it is getting better much faster.
Re: Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of five, don't you mean "two to three"? And under that comparison, isn't it scary how much it does sound that way? Like a kid who hears words together but don't know what they mean yet? (and doesn't really get the cultural things around it.) To me it sounds like a quite musical 2-3 year old stringing words together. Doesn't it strike anyone else that way? These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We…
> These things are going to grow up very, very soon! We know that. It's scary. I'll believe it when I see it. Your post has just a bit too much futurologist science fantasy wishful thinking in it.
Of course, I have no way of knowing how soon "very soon" is.
However, although my post may have wishful thinking in it, I think if you investigate the reality of the cells that contribute to human thinking, you will come to the conclusion that it is impossible that this or some similar system should not be modelled in computers within the next hundred years. You can look at the processing involved yourself. Just remember that the whole is the sum of the parts, and the parts are doing slow, biological things - it's not silicon etchings that work at practically the speed of light. Neural signals propagate at something like 100 meters per second at the fastest[1] - light propagates at 299 792 458 meters per second and if you look at our 4 Ghz CPU's you will see that in a clock cycle light just goes about 10 cm.[2] Light goes fast enough to make a million trips across a server room in the time it takes neurons to fire. While staggeringly complex, the fact is, our server rooms are doing more.
This is like heavier-than-air flight. Let's say the fuels and engines are there - but we don't know how to assemble them.
When we see neural nets produce results that are similar to what young children produce, this is amazing. I cannot overemphasize that at any moment we can have a breakthrough. We have so much more computational power than required: 3 pounds! 20 watts! 86 billion neurons with 7000 connections! And at speeds of 300 herz.
The training time for a human brain to get to intelligence even close to adulthood is, let's say, 12 to 14 years even in the most precocious.
We're looking at the output of neural nets that receive perhaps months of training.
This stuff is happening right now. It's absolutely astounding and there is no limit to what can be unlocked overnight. Any server farm at Amazon or Google has the hardware today to go through 10 years of human brain training in about 10 months, and then end up with a network that thinks ten times the speed of human thought. It's there, today. Three pounds. Twenty watts. Three pounds. Twenty watts. Three pounds. Twenty watts.
It's not miraculous. It's happening.
[1] http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/21790/how-long-do...
Re: Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
#28One of the cofounders of the Echonest (acquired by Spotify) created this back in 2004:
"A Singular Christmas" was composed and rendered in 2004. It is the automatic statistical distillation of hundreds of Christmas songs; the 16-song answer to the question asked of a bank of computers: "What is Christmas Music, really?"
Re: Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
I suspect it's an easy way to get something that won't sound completely dissonant, especially because you can use the same blues scale over multiple chords.
I can see the logic behind that, but without any sort of tension/release between the melody and chords, it still sounds just as dissonant to my ears.
Granted, it will never win any awards. Part of the choice behind it might have been the desire to "ship" it before Christmas.
Re: Artificial Intelligence Generates Christmas Song from Holiday Image
#30Show me the same algorithm generate songs in a different genre from different images and I'll be impressed.
I'm from the project team. This is a very interesting point.
While it is easy to crawl many songs from the internet, it is a little harder to gather the same amount but with proper genre/style/etc labels, although it is not impossible.
For now there's only one genre, which we call it "the genre of whatever is on the internet". So whatever music files on there, many of them quite "crappy", were used to train the model. Also there are many other problems on how to better structure and flavor the composition.
This is just a very early-stage attempt, as a CS student's fun side project. We are working with people with real musical talent now and hoping to make better songs in the next version.