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A.I. Duet: A piano that responds to you

aiexperiments.withgoogle.com

51–60 of 77 posts

Re: A.I. Duet: A piano that responds to you

#51
post #2

I like the concept and the framing of the demo is really cool, but the actual music generated in response to me doing basic things like playing a blues riff or a pentatonic scale was usually just a repeat of some fragment of what I was playing. It felt like something that could be built using a basic heuristic...

Yeah either the examples from the video are cherry-picked, or something's wrong with the deployment, because what I get is way worse than what's in the video. I really don't like this new trend of throwing Deep Learning at anything without really checking whether a simple model (e.g. markov chains in this case) would give equal results. Because using a simple model wouldn't be "cool" or newsworthy...

When you've described the entire new vision of your company as being "doing things with deep learning", you aren't going to bother seeing if the simpler solution works. Just isn't good for business.

Re: A.I. Duet: A piano that responds to you

#52
I was excited to play with this, but ultimately left disappointed. I was hoping that my initial melodies would be expanded upon and that I could build a series of riffs that would become increasingly complex but based on the same starting melody, but in the end, the responses from the AI seemed to be fairly random, and didn't seem to be built upon the previous sequences at all. The AI also changed keys a couple of times, which was disconcerting.

Re: A.I. Duet: A piano that responds to you

#53
Me: plays a couple of minor chords

AI: long pause; holds down one random key for several seconds; boops another random key "Nailed it."

After spending a few minutes playing, I did see evidence of it occasionally tracking my chords (as long as they were very common - e.g. c major, a minor) and tempo (but only matching tempo, as in vaguely matching how fast I was playing, not actually playing in time with me). I played an extended chord sequence and it made one or two nice contributions, but mostly it was just random noise.

I wonder if this is due to lack of training data? Maybe it needs an actual data set of people specifically trading musical phrases with each other, rather than just a set of general music.

It's an amazing idea, and I can actually see it being quite interesting for things like musical phrase creation - supply the first half of a phrase and see what the machine comes up with for the second half, and tweak as appropriate. But currently it's a bit of a case of over promising and under delivering.

Re: A.I. Duet: A piano that responds to you

#54
post #47

I've had the most success in my own experiments using many dedicated Models. The first and most important model is a NN that generates a chord progression. After that is much easier to select good notes! http://signalsandsorcery.com/

Markov chains might do better for progressions :)

I have tried just using N-grams which is pretty good but it doesn't have any structure. My next experiment will be to use the 'word2vec' algorithm the same way it it used for NLP. Meaning first create relationships between chords then create sequences with RNN.

Re: A.I. Duet: A piano that responds to you

#55
post #2

I like the concept and the framing of the demo is really cool, but the actual music generated in response to me doing basic things like playing a blues riff or a pentatonic scale was usually just a repeat of some fragment of what I was playing. It felt like something that could be built using a basic heuristic...

even going a simple jingle bells loop (I know, I haven't studied much) get's a pretty much nonsensical repeat response.

on a side note I'd like to have an option to put ai on mute and have the duet run after a session, since it's extremely disorienting for a noob to play with random noise on the feedback loop

Re: A.I. Duet: A piano that responds to you

#57

Definitely a work in progress. Was like having a goddamn cat following my fingers around the piano. No sense of rhythm or tonality whatsoever. Like, it objectively made whatever I was playing sound worse. It may "respond" but it's a lot more like throwing electricity through a dead body than working with a competent duet partner.

Haha...love the cat and dead body idioms. Captures the fail perfectly.

Re: A.I. Duet: A piano that responds to you

#59

I know this is meant to be a "cool experiment", but from trying this out for a while my impression is: I could just build a random sequence generator and tell the world "I made this with tensorflow" and people would believe. I mean, none of the response sounded like music. Which is fine, but then again, what is the machine learning for, if it just sounds like random keystrokes?

I think that this response is confused. What is your point? That people can't differentiate random notes from a duet? That people would believe that anything associated with tensorflow was imbued with sophisticated behavior?

How does that relate to this experiment? It's clearly not just playing random notes in the example video...

Re: A.I. Duet: A piano that responds to you

#60
post #59

I know this is meant to be a "cool experiment", but from trying this out for a while my impression is: I could just build a random sequence generator and tell the world "I made this with tensorflow" and people would believe. I mean, none of the response sounded like music. Which is fine, but then again, what is the machine learning for, if it just sounds like random keystrokes?

I think that this response is confused. What is your point? That people can't differentiate random notes from a duet? That people would believe that anything associated with tensorflow was imbued with sophisticated behavior? How does that relate to this experiment? It's clearly not just playing random notes in the example video...

The AI is clearly improvising musically based on the input, it's far from random notes. It's actually pretty cool and I look forward to seeing where it goes from here. The person you're responding to is just an asshole.
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