The Yandex neural network co-wrote a play for viola and orchestra

In the last season of the Simpsons, the main character learned that in order to charm geeks, you need to start a song that was composed by the neural network. Everyone will be fascinated to listen and dance. The Yandex company has almost implemented this idea.



The composer Kuzma Bodrov said that his last work - the Composition for viola and orchestra - was written not by one, but in collaboration with the Yandex network. The neural network, specially trained in classical music, generated a musical series on the basis of which Kuzma could write a melody and develop it into a whole play. The musical premiere of the opus will take place at a gala concert at the closing ceremony of the XII Winter International Art Festival in Sochi.



“The idea was a joint one — Yuri Bashmet and Dmitry Grinchenko,” says the composer. - I received about twenty-something files from Yandex neural network. These were the melodic lines laid out on the piano. Oddly enough, they had interesting grains, for which the ear clings. But they were not decorated. It was a single meaningless stream, as is the case with unhealthy people. Although there were sometimes rhythmic formations in this stream. I took from there a few of these topics and a little polished them. Then he continued a more conscious alignment of the form, made an orchestration, and derived a solo viola part. It turned out such a work.

')

We can not expect that the neural network will reliably produce musical masterpieces. However, it is capable of generating an infinite amount of musical material in which interesting fragments come across. This can help authors who are looking for an idea: “Composers, when they start to compose, usually face the problem: what to catch on, what thread to pull to find a melodic turn, either a chord or timbre,” explains Kuzma Bodrov. - And this found begins, as it were, to grow into. There is always difficulty in this search. And in this case it was easier. These grains have already been set. I got the bricks from which I started building the building. This can be called co-authorship, because the melodic lines were proposed not by me, but by a neural network. ”



Kuzma Bodrov jokes that the author's reward really needs to be paid to both authors, because this is full co-authorship.



The author said that the duration of the work is 7-8 minutes. The author pushed off from the English “land” genre, where the melody is repeated, and everything changes. At the same time, he decided to choose the fast pace that was offered to him by the Yandex “neural network”. He gave the proposed melody to a solo piano, began to loop many times and build variations around.



The name for the work has not yet been invented. The editors of Yandex will still listen to the play and can offer some sensible ideas.



This is not the first musical work of Yandex’s neural network. In 2016, she helped compose the album “Neural Defense” , performed in the style of Egor Letov and the group “Civil Defense”. True, the work of Artificial Intelligence there was limited to writing poems.



Neuropoet has been working for Yandex for a long time. In 2017, he composed poems in the style of Kurt Cobain , the lead singer of Nirvana. That musical project was led by Alexey Tikhonov and Ivan Yamshchikov, an employee of the Max Planck Society for Scientific Mathematics Institute in Leipzig. At the same time, the authors published a preprint of scientific work on the generation of music by the neural network.



Most likely, a new project of automatic music generation is based on the same scientific work. The article Music Generation with Variational Recurrent Autoencoder Supported by History has been updated several times, and the latest version is dated November 12, 2018. That is, it is clear that the authors continue to work on the project.





Variational recurrent autoencoder scheme with history support (Variational Recurrent Autoencoder Supported by History, VRASH) for music generation. Click to open enlarged image.



Yandex will be broadcasting a concert where they will perform a composition for viola and orchestra, written in collaboration with the neural network. The broadcast will take place on February 24 at 19:00 (Moscow time). The broadcast can also be launched on the website of the Kultura TV channel .