Editors' Choice

Technology Is Advancing So Fast, Programs Can Now Write Music, Well Sort Of

Shelby Chau / January 3, 2017

Portable CD players went the way of the dodo when MP3 players with non-removable storage came to market. They were smaller and took up much less space than their bulky discman cousins. A few short years later and we saw the iPhone hit the market. While our pockets got a little lighter, so did our wallets because the iPhone cost as much, if not more, than the two individual devices combined.



Our phones have come a long way from the days of those indestructible Nokia workhorses. Gone with the times are the need to carry multiple devices. The youth of today will never know the feeling of getting ready to head out of the house and having to make sure you’ve charged all of your devices, or even worse, wondering how much charge was left in those alkaline batteries powering their CD players. A way to make calls, a device for playing music, a GPS, a calculator – your phone can do it all. Think of the pocket space you’ve saved just by carrying around your phone.


Source: Trolino


So, here we are at the dawn of another cultural and technological revolution. Automation is everywhere, and it’s a force that can’t be stopped. Earlier this year we saw a short film written by a computer algorithm. Be warned though, it is disjointed and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but it is surprisingly poetic and hauntingly eerie at the same time.



Imagine a future where even the art and entertainment you consume is conceptualized and created by machines and computer programs. Someone can log in to a computer, press a button, and a complex system will scour the Internet, message boards, IMDB, and Facebook to see what works and what doesn’t. In the end, an algorithm will create the next smash hit animated film with little to no human interaction needed. How would you feel about that? Would you watch after the novelty wears off? Should art and autonomous technology be separated? Do androids not dream of electric sheep?



So, what about music? Are humans the only beings that deserve to express themselves through song? Here’s a little program that lets you use the technological powerhouse contained in your phone (or computer) to create music. The app is called Giorgio Cam and can be accessed through this website here . It was created by Eric Rosenbaum, Yotam Mann, and some of the good people over at Google Creative Labs. It uses your device’s camera, MarryTTS, Tone.JS and Google’s Cloud Vision API to interpret images in front of your device to create songs about them. Yeah, pretty soon your phone will be able to freestyle better than you. Hop along B-Rabbit.