Now, artificial intelligence can write four-part harmony. It just can’t do it very well.
Thursday’s Google Doodle celebrates Johann Sebastian Bach with its first artificial intelligence-powered doodle. By Anne Midgette Anne Midgette Classical music critic Email Bio Follow Classical music critic March 21 at 5:58 PM You, too, can compose like Bach. Or rather, artificial intelligence can compose like Bach.
It may only add to the doodle’s charm that what it actually proves is the opposite of what it sets out to do. Nobody can compose like Bach. Especially not a machine. You already knew that. But you can have a lot of fun along the way to finding it out. Music and math, according to stereotype, tend to group together in people’s brains. This doodle is an example of the limitations of that premise. It was certainly a technological feat that required a whole team of engineers. Three hundred and six Bach chorales were fed into a machine-learning model, called Coconet, which used the data to inform the generation of its own harmonizations.
But what happens when you actually type a melody into the doodle is, well, akin to most of the random-generator programs online that allow us to create poems or stripper names or other diversions. If you’re not confident about writing yourself, the doodle offers two familiar tunes, “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” on which it perpetrates a range of variations, each time different, and some of them downright horrible.
This is not to rag on the doodle, which admirably fulfilled its purpose of getting people to talk and think about composition in general, and Bach in particular, a few days before his 334th birthday. The goal, according to Leon Hong, a member of the Google Doodle team, in the accompanying video Google released about the project, is “combining art with technology and allowing people to create things they couldn’t create before.
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