Herself’s Artificial Intelligence

“Song of the Neurons”, soon to be available on iTunes, contains 14 songs created by a ‘Creativity Machine’ trained by Thaler. Creativity Machines are neural nets that learn by the feedback you give to them. He sat with his machine and gave it smiles or frowns for the noise it made. Eventually the noise became music and 14 songs were created.

Thaler’s Creativity Machines know as much about music as he does — pretty much nothing. He didn’t program them. He didn’t give them examples of music to study. He simply listened to sounds the programs spontaneously generated and offered a simple critique.

Thaler holed up in his basement for eight hours one day with his musical Creativity Machine and a webcam. He turned on the Creativity Machine — an untrained artificial intelligence computer known as a neural network. The neurons in the computer brain are mathematical entities instead of brain cells. Thaler started the creative process by tweaking the mathematical connections between the neurons. That set off a cascade of calculations that were translated as sounds.

Thaler sat in front of the webcam and listened. He indicated his likes with a smile and displeasure with a frown. A critic program connected to the music-generating program learned by watching the emotions play on his face what Thaler liked and gave him more of that. It learned what he didn’t like and gave him less of that.

Computers compose personalized music