Users can play the piano with just 8 buttons.
Google’s new idea and innovation have brought in the Guitar Hero and Rock Band games together and made the best use of AI. Stating this, their latest innovation is an addition of AI to music and to let anyone be able to play the Piano, no matter the user’s skill level.
The controller is called Piano Genie, and it comes from Google’s Magenta research project. Powered by a neural network trained on classical piano music, Piano Genie translates what the user taps out on 8 buttons into music that uses all 88 piano keys.
“I really wanted to design a tool that we could give to someone who doesn’t know how to play, and they’d be able to create music with some kind of intention,” Google Magenta intern Chris Donahue, told The Verge.
Google’s AI-powered Piano Genie lets anyone improvise perfectly by bashing buttons https://t.co/GCUSNh2j4Q pic.twitter.com/6wa5LoH6Np
— The Verge (@verge) October 16, 2018
“When you’re playing it, it’s this really awesome experience where, occasionally, it will feel like it’s sort of reading your mind and play the exact note you’re intending to. And then other times, it will completely disobey you but still do something reasonable.”
The neural network was trained on approximately 1,400 performances from the International Piano-e-Competition. The result is a system that can determine what notes should follow each other and lets its users improvise a note at a time.
Google Magenta has made the model training code available on GitHub and anyone can try Piano Genie out for themselves through a web demo here.