When we think about the applications for artificial intelligence (AI), we usually think about things like logistics efficiency, self-driving vehicle route-finding, language processing, and data-crunching. Computers are great at data crunching.
But the folks at Baidu, who’ve been building AI for all kinds of tasks, had another thought. What can AI offer to the realm of art? In a new exhibit at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, the company is showing off an early answer to that question: an AI that analyzes paintings and then composes original music inspired by them.
How does that sound? Check out this promotional video Baidu shared with Tech in Asia. You can skip to 0:38 for the first machine-composed piece, and there’s another at 2:28.
In case you can’t listen, both are simple piano melodies. The first piece, based on Van Gogh’s The Starry Night, is soft and contemplative. The second, inspired by a painting of eight galloping horses, is more fast-paced and upbeat, with a vaguely Chinese flair that matches the painting’s Chinese origins.
According to Baidu, the AI accomplishes this by first analyzing the content of an image, doing things like identifying objects (is that a cat or a human?) and assigning moods to elements of the images (red for passion, yellow for warmth). Once it has an idea about the emotional feel of the image based on all the attributes it can identify, then it’s on to the music composition. The AI has access to a vast trove of musical scores that are broken down into musical units by feel. The AI then composes a piece using musical units that correlate with the visual elements it identified in the image.
Not exactly how Bach would have done it, perhaps, but the results seem pretty impressive. Obviously, whether or not music really “fits” an image is entirely subjective, but I think most people would agree that Baidu has at least come fairly close here.
The songs in the video aren’t the only ones Baidu’s AI has come up with. There are others, including two inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s The 1/4 Mile or 2 Furlong Piece, that you can catch at the UCCA exhibit in Beijing through August 21.
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