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Neural story singing Christmas

12 December 2016 - 16:36 | Interesting information
Neural story singing Christmas

A neural network at the University of Toronto wrote a holiday ditty based on an image of a Christmas tree
It may seem like some of the songs on Christmas-themed radio stations were written by robots, but at least one new holiday song actually was. An artificial intelligence program developed by computer scientists at the University of Toronto recently penned its own Christmas ditty based on a digital photograph of a Christmas tree.

"White Christmas" it is not. The computer-generated female voice sings about flowers on the Christmas tree and a blessing being the best gift while backed up by a repetitive piano soundtrack. There is also a disturbing moment of semi-self awareness 

While the song may be rudimentary, the research behind it is not. It’s part of larger project teaching neural networks to create. For this basic holiday tune, Ph.D. student Hang Chu trained a neural network on 100 hours of digital music. The program was then able to come up with some rules and create its own beats and melodies, layering drums and chords overtop, Sample reports. He details the project in a paper on the preprint server arXiv.org.


But the most important thing about the song is that it shows new potentials for artificial intelligence. “We are used to thinking about A.I. for robotics and things like that. The question now is what can A.I. do for us?” Raquel Urtasun, an associate professor in machine learning and computer vision the University of Toronto tells Ian Sample at The Guardian.

Lots to decorate the room.
The Christmas tree is filled with flowers. I swear its Christmas Eve.
I hope thats what you say.
The best Christmas present in the world is a blessing.
I've always been there for the rest of our lives.
A hundred and a half hour ago. I am glad to meet you.
I can hear the music coming from the hall.
A fairy tale. A Christmas tree.
There are lots and lots and lots of flowers.