Looking forward to a more interactive demo of this tech. The headline is ridiculous though - I can use a RNG for a handful of frequencies and create a sound humans have never heard before.

These were utterly unimpressive sounds.

I can replicate these sounds in a few minutes mixing on my 10 year old $120 Yamaha keyboard, if it's not in one of the built-in 999 x 999 sounds (because I can combine two sounds easily using the built in functionality), then I can mix it myself -- but it is already so close to the built-in sound.

Will be excited if an AI can make instruments that move me.

I'm asking myself if a synth is just a boring application for a model like this. But maybe it would be possible to implement a new kind of efficient sound compression algorithm.

It's a shame the article uses soundcloud clips, because I suspect the end sounds aren't the impressive bit. I think it's the user interface that's the interesting bit here.

> In addition to the NSynth “slider” that Engel recently demonstrated at Google headquarters, the team has also built a two-dimensional interface that lets you explore the audible space between four different instruments at once. And the team is intent on taking the idea further still, exploring the boundaries of artistic creation. A second neural network, for instance, could learn new ways of mimicking and combining the sounds from all those instruments. AI could work in tandem with AI.

A video of this would have been much more useful to me.

To me it sounds exactly like they're playing the two instruments on top of each other, if not 'side by side' - which is to say, not like something I've never heard before.

Agreed, I was quite disappointed. I actually thought we would here new sounds humans have never heard before. This was more like two instruments picked from an orchestra or, playing two bank settings on a synth on a split keyboard.

The instrument blending is unique, but agree that this was utterly underwhelming.

oh wow. music producers invent sounds no one heard before all the time >.> ever listen to neurofunk? ;D Why dont they make an AI that does something useful for a change instead of one that can look at cat pictures and produce jibberish!

Children are seldom useful in the first 13-21 years of their life, why do AIs have to be useful before they are ready?

> Children are seldom useful in the first 13-21 years of their life

[Citation Needed]

These sort of headlines make it clear we are in a goldrush right now. What a ridiculous title.

Any article about AI contains tons of hand-wavey hyped tech. That's nothing new.

The website for their project [1] is much more toned down, so you can blame the journalist or Google's PR team for pitching an interesting angle.

[1] https://magenta.tensorflow.org/nsynth

These sound like bad synths.

This is off topic but the website the author linked to for "Moogfest" has a very unique design:

http://www.moogfest.com/

Haven't seen anything like that before. Scrolling marques everywhere. I wonder if this will be a new trend.

It sort-of is a new trend.

http://brutalistwebsites.com/

Giorgio Moroder did it first.

In related news, google has created the first electric hipster.