What an age to live in! An age where robots compose songs, not very good songs, but still…

The song was created by an AI from a group of scientists from the University of Toronto. The researchers uploaded over 100 hours of pop music on the computer using the recurrent neural network.  This technique entitles learning through building connections from the present data. This is similar to how humans learn.

Learning robot creates Christmas carol

The uploaded pop music hence taught the neural network the general structure of this genre of songs. The scientists then presented a decorated Christmas tree image to the AI and asked it using the data in its system to create a song from the picture.

The researchers described the technique as a neural story-singing, which involves creating a story from an image. The computer consequently created a story about the Christmas tree from the image it was fed.  After the story had been created, they introduced a rhythm that the robot was to link the end of the story sentences to the beat.

After this, they connected the beat and pitch, creating the first Christmas song written by Artificial Intelligence.

Give credit to where it’s due

Suffice the Christmas song sounding appalling, the A.I did technically sing a Christmas carol. It mentions the words “Christmas” and “lots and lots and lots of flowers.”

“Lots of decorations in the room the Christmas tree is filled with flowers, the best Christmas present in the world is blessings, said the AI in its song. “I have always been there for the rest of our lives. A hundred and half hours ago. I can hear the music coming from the hall. A fairy tale. A Christmas tree. There lots and lots and lots of flowers.”

The team has named the technique “neural Karaoke.”

The evolution of AI

It is quite outstanding how far Artificial Intelligence has come. Scientists are now asking “what can AI do for us?” rather than what humanity can do for AI. This is first signs what the robots do independently. Though still in its infancy stages the output was quite remarkable.

What the future holds

Still, only a farfetched idea scientists one-day robots creating songs and even dance moves. “You can imagine having an AI channel on Pandora or Spotify that generates music, or takes people’s pictures and sings about them,” said Sanja Fidler from the University of Toronto. “It’s about what can deep learning do to make life more fun?”

Application to dance

The team hopes to use the same technique to apply AI dancing. They will feed over 100 hours of dance moves and footage from Just Dance. Using its neural network the computer will connect the music to the dance moves. It will use a stick projection to simulate new dance moves on the screen. The team is already predicting “Dad-like dance moves.” But, still very excited for this next step