Google's AI art project tickles the ivories in its debut - CNET

Move over Gaga, here comes Google.

The Web giant on Wednesday unveiled a 90-second piano melody (mp3), the first piece of art created by machine leaing as part of Project Magenta. The project, aounced last week at Moogfest, is an artificial intelligence effort to create original music and visual art.

Along with creating music and art, another goal of the project is to build a community of artists, coders and machine leaing researchers, Douglas Eck, a research scientist working on Project Magenta, wrote in a blog post Wednesday explaining more about the team's ambitions. Eck wrote that the team wants to open-source the infrastructure, begiing with audio and video support.

One of the greatest challenges of the project is not only creating art but also telling a compelling story, Eck wrote.

"The design of models that lea to construct long narrative arcs is important not only for music and art generation, but also areas like language modeling, where it remains a challenge to carry meaning even across a long paragraph, much less whole stories," Eck wrote

The project is built on top of Google's TensorFlow, the artificial-intelligence engine the Web giant uses to add capabilities such as speech and object recognition to its products.