Science & technology | Programmes by programs

Composing by computer

Concerts may soon feature music written by artificial intelligence

Play it again, Nikita

THESE DAYS, anyone with a computer can be a composer. Sort of. Give a piece of commercial software such as Magenta, developed by Google, the first few notes of a song, and it will make something merrily tuneful out of them. Tuneful, but not sophisticated. At least, that is the view of Gerhard Widmer of Johannes Kepler University, in Linz, Austria.

This article appeared in the Science & technology section of the print edition under the headline “Programmes by programs”

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