‘Machine folk’ music shows the creative side of AI

Dr Bob Sturm, from the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, and Kingston University's Dr Oded Ben-Tal explain their research creating artificial intelligence that can write folk music and whether this can open new areas of creativity. Folk music is part of a rich cultural context that stretches back into the past, encompassing the real and the mythical, bound to the traditions of the culture in which it arises. Artificial intelligence, on the other hand, has no culture, no traditions. But it has shown great ability: beating grand masters at chess and Go , for example, or demonstrating uncanny wordplay skills when IBM Watson beat human competitors at Jeopardy. Could the power of AI be put to use to create music? This is not entirely unprecedented: an artificial intelligence co-wrote a piece of musical theatre , from the storyline to the music and lyrics. It premiered in London in 2016. The advancement of AI techniques and ever-larger collections of data to use to train them presents broad opportunities for creative research.