Doug leads Magenta, a Google Brain project working to generate music, video, image and text using deep learning and reinforcement learning. A main goal of Magenta is to better understanding how AI can enable artists and musicians to express themselves in innovative new ways. Before Magenta, Doug led the Google Play Music search and recommendation team. From 2003 to 2010 Doug was faculty at the University of Montreal’s MILA Machine Learning lab, where he worked on expressive music performance and automatic tagging of music audio.
Abstract:
The Role of AI and Machine Learning in Creativity:
I’ll discuss Magenta, a Google Brain project investigating music and art generation using deep learning and reinforcement learning. I’ll describe the goals of Magenta and how it fits into the general trend of AI moving into our daily lives. One crucial question is: Where does AI and Machine Learning fit in the creative process? I’ll argue that it’s about augmenting and extending the artist rather than just creating artifacts (songs, paintings, etc.) with machines. I’ll talk about two recent projects. In the first, we explore the use of recurrent neural networks to extend musical phrases in different ways. In the second we look at teaching a neural network to draw with strokes. This will be a high-level overview talk with no need for knowledge of AI or Machine Learning.
