The Australian National University (ANU) is hosting an AI music experience called “System of a Sound”.
There’s been a lot of buzz lately around AI-generated art and how artificial learning could create paintings, songs and videos. It has largely involved web-based AI art generators, but every now and then something really cool comes along.
Now, an AI-based music application is part of an exhibition at ANU’s Birch building. The larger exhibition, Australian Cybernetic: A Point Through Time, involves a lot of emerging and developing tech, such as cybernetics and drones.
“System of a Sound explores a dialogue between data, language and humans to create music,” the webpage for the AI reads.
“Through artificial intelligence, real-time data is translated into text and matched to a human-tagged music database to create an evolving music stream.”
If you’d like to take the music AI for a spin, you very much can, as long as you have either a mouse or a webcam. If you head over to the website, you’ll be able to use either device to power the instruments backing up the AI-generated symphony.
The information the AI is basing its sounds on is really interesting. Different layers of the AI include data translated from:
- The ANU School of Cybernetics’ Twitter account
- Australian economic data from the World Bank
- Australian infrastructure data from the World Bank
- Public sector data from the World Bank
- The most-read Wikipedia articles worldwide
- Canberra’s carbon emissions data
Um. What?
So, okay, yeah, the text from data sets are being fed through the program to create soundscapes, with the tone and delivery of these data sets impacting what sounds are formed.
Yeah, okay cool.
Additionally, the modality of the music is influenced by Canberra’s real-time weather. Sunny weather means happier modalities, while cloudy weather means more melancholic sounds.
It’s a pretty cool idea, but the data sets seem to be a bit broad. Also, the sounds are pretty weird. It might be a while before I pass an AI the aux cord.
The exhibition will run until December 2.