Lyreland: the artificial intelligence that makes up music

Two students at Epita, a computer science school, can boast of a great success: a neural network capable of composing original music after learning the rules of a musical style. One of its creators tells us the story of this original innovation, called Lyreland.

It is a student project of Epita, School of Computer Engineers. He was born from a bet during a discussion among friends around the electro style. Could a computer do the same? In the months that followed, the answer was brilliantly given.
This friendly challenge has become a sophisticated development of artificial intelligence, dubbed Lyreland, which will take a year to Olivier Laugier and Pierre-Alexandre Veyry. "Initially, reports the latter, it was only an algorithm that classified music by genre. Subsequently, we started from scratch to create a neural network that learns to produce sequential data similar to the music it has observed. Their baby learned to move from one note to the next by following rules extracted from music analysis.
Lyreland took shape as a specialist in Celtic songs. "It's a coincidence, says Pierre-Alexandre Veyry, who, all the same, lives in Ireland. We found a base of a thousand pieces in free access. This is what allowed to train the neural network. He must stay in this style, but we could teach him others. "

---This composer has made illusion---

Such as, Lyreland does not produce sounds because it works on ABC-encoded partitions, a notation appeared in the 1990 that uses letters to be transposed into ASCII. "Google generates songs with Deep Mind, but working directly on the music. For Lyreland to produce music, all that is needed is to read the scores created by instrumental synthesis software.
What can a tool like this be used for? "Two things. It can help a musician to turn around a ready made composition. It can also create musical backgrounds for videos that we are sure will be copyright free. Moreover, the two developers verified that their neural network did not reproduce sequences contained in the base used but that it created many original pieces.
During tests, the songs generated by Lyreland made illusion among the people who listened to them. "We've created almost 400. Some are better than others, of course. So, yes, an artificial intelligence can compose pieces of music that look good ...