Amazon Alexa has a new skill called Deep Music that allows users to play music that has been composed by artificial intelligence . As Music Ally reports, Amazon just launched the feature and its available on Alexa gadgets like the Echo speakers.
“DeepMusic is an Alexa skill that enables you to listen to songs generated by artificial intelligence (AI),” the official Deep Music page on Amazon reads. “Each song was composed entirely using AI. The songs were generated using a collection of audio samples and a deep recurrent neural network. There has been no post-production editing by a human.”
What’s more, artificial intelligence was also used to create the artwork shown on the Echo Spot and Echo Show speakers. The skill can be activated by saying “Alexa, open DeepMusic” or “Alexa, ask DeepMusic to play a song.”
So does Deep Music’s AI make better music than humans? Well, good music is in the ear of the beholder.
One early adopter said on Reddit , “Just enabled… So far so good. Music = math.”
However, some Amazon reviewers noted that while the tunes were pleasant, they did sound like they were composed by a robot.
“The music itself is interesting. It is like electronic piano background music, kind of like the style of old video game music,” one reviewer wrote. “It definitely has a robotic feel to it, but it is compelling nevertheless. It sounds a bit random to me, but maybe I’m just not used to this composer’s style.”
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This isn’t the first time that a neural network has been used to make music. As Futurism reported last year, the first album produced and composed by an AI was released. The AI composer’s name is Amper and was created as a collaboration between musicians and neural network experts. The album was released in August of last year, and a video of one of its songs, “Break Free,” has over 1.5 million views.
One of the composers behind its creation, Drew Silverstein, said that Amper isn’t supposed to work on its own. Instead, it’s meant to work with humans, but that doesn’t diminish the work the AI actually did. The team told Futurism that the chord structures and instrumentation of “Break Free” were completely done by Amper’s AI.
