Inventing music has always been one of our proudest achievements as a species. We have been composing and consuming music for millennia. Over the years, thousands of different styles emerged to satisfy the needs of every individual. Human creativity is the key ingredient to composing new melodies and cannot be replaced by any other means. At least that’s what we thought up until recently.

Composing Music with Artificial Intelligence

What if I told that we’re now at the point where we have managed to create AI that is able to generate music. Several research teams and even startups have developed AI that can compose somewhat decent melodies. In some cases, the pieces created by the AI are pretty good actually.

Although this type of research has been going on for many years, we have now reached the point where the outcome is good enough to create human-like composed music. Google’s DeepMind has developed AI-composers using deep learning that are able to create melodies based on pieces of famous composers like Bach,Tchaikovsky and many others. Sony CSL research team has created flow-machines, which is a collection of AI algorithms that aids musicians in composing new music. The results of both teams are quite fascinating and really show a glimpse of how the music industry is going to look like in the very near future.

Some AI Music

These two examples were generated using AI in collaboration with real artists. The outcome is objectively good compared to what most of us expect from AI-composers.

This piece was created by flow-machines from scratch. It was composed in the style of the Beatles.

This piece was created in collaboration with real artists and it’s part of the first ever album released, called Hello World, where AI-composers “met” with real artists to create original work. You can find out more about this album at their official website.

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We used to see major improvements in smartphone cameras year after year, but this seems to have changed recently. Manufacturers are now struggling to create and integrate cameras on smartphones that produce higher quality photos from last year’s model. The main reason for this deceleration in the smartphone camera evolution, is due to hardware limitations. Built-in cameras need to be small and compact, leaving them lacking in comparison to DSLRs with large and interchangeable lenses. For this reason, smartphone cameras will never be able to catch up with the quality of DSLRs. Or will they?

Smartphone manufacturers are well aware of these hardware limitations. Companies like Google have turned their focus on improving their camera quality through the use of software. The results of their efforts are astonishing and can be seen on their latest phone, the Pixel 2. Despite being the best smartphone camera in the market so far, Pixel 2 falls behind even the lowest quality DSLRs.

Does this mean there’s no hope for smartphone cameras afterall? Well..no.

A research team has created a tool that helps you capture photos with quality comparable to that of a DSLR. They achieved this by using deep convolutional neural networks to train a model that is able to recreate missing details on photos taken from smartphones. This neural network is trained on a dataset of images captured by state of the art DSLRs as well as smartphones. This way, it is able to tell what pieces of information are missing from the photos taken on smartphones and therefore recreated those details and add them to the low quality photos. The final images produced by the algorithms have quality comparable to that of an original photo taken from a DSLR camera.

You can test this yourself by uploading your own photo on their website. If you’re interested in finding out more about this research, you can do so by reading their paper, which is available for free on their website.

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