Sony releases world's first AI song in style of The Beatles

A YouTube video featuring a song called "Daddy's Car" released last week and is one of the latest products of artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Created automatically by Sony on FlowComposer, the AI tool is based on machine learning including an intelligent assistant that composes new songs in different rhythms. The song is in the style of the Beatles; however, there is still a human touch to the song as French composer Benoit Carre was responsible during the creation process.

Sony CSL Research Laboratory has created two pop songs with AI. "[The] Flow Machines software learns music styles from a huge database of songs. Then, exploiting unique combinations of style transfer, optimization and interaction techniques, it can compose in any style," the team says on its website. The second song named "The Ballad of Mr Shadow" is a composition reminiscent of those by American songwriters such as Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington, George Gershwin and Cole Porter.

Covering thousands of lead sheets from different composers and styles, the database called LDSB is the main body of the AI project. For the first step, the human composer selects a style and generates a lead sheet with the system. Using another system called Rechord, the human musician matches some audio chunks from audio recordings of other songs to the generated lead sheets. Since 1997, Sony's Computer Science Laboratory in Paris has been working on the research and development of pioneering music technologies. "Daddy's Car" is an excerpt of an AI pop album to be released in 2017.