AI and Creativity

Understanding and comprehending the intersection between art and mathematics is not new. Whether it is the discovery of mathematical patterns in Johann Sebastian Bach’s fugues or the geometric abstraction of cubism. The two hemispheres of our brains interact strongly in the creative process. With the democratization of incredible computing resources, massively iterative computing has become feasible, which led to the most recent Golden Age of AI1. The ability to work using datasets of unprecedented scale to train deep learning and other machine learning models are opening the door to a new dawn of human creative augmentation.

In art, augmentation is no more than medium and technique. The first musical instrument is augmentation. So is the paint brush. We all saw what happened in the last 3 decades when Photoshop replaced the paintbrush in image manipulation. Now we are taking an extra step by diving deeply into AI’s capabilities to augment more challenging situations.

In the research led by Dr. Maya Ackerman, we are exploring AI’s creative application in the generation of music. While many of us have had the chance to learn an instrument, the act of creating a song or a piece of music has been well out of reach for most of us. Dr. Ackerman poses the question: ‘Why? Why not allow a sufficiently advanced augmentation to democratize the creation of music?”

Follow her work through WaveAI, the company behind the first composition augmentation application: ALYSIA.

  1. There have been several golden ages before this one, although there is reason to believe that we have a long way to go before the current one would come to a close. ↩︎