Today on March 21, 2019, Google celebrates the 334th birthday of world-renowned German composer and musician Johann Sebastian Bach with its first artificial intelligence-powered Doodle.
Today's Bach Doodle is interactive and encourages individuals to compose their own two-measure melody. Then, with the press of a button, the Google Doodle uses machine learning to harmonize the custom melody into Bach's signature music style. Google has been working on this project for three years.
Google describes machine learning as the process of teaching a computer to come up with its own answers by showing it a lot of examples, instead of giving it a set of rules to follow, as is done in traditional computer programming. The machine learning model used in today's Doodle was developed by Magenta Team AI Resident Anna Huang, who developed Coconet — a versatile model that can be used in a wide range of musical tasks, such as harmonizing melodies or composing from scratch.
Want to compose your own melody? Check out Bach's birthday Doodle.
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