It is the end of term this week and my film pro­duc­tion stu­dents asked me to name my favorite part of film­mak­ing. I told them it’s direct­ing, as it’s some­thing I so rarely get to do (com­pared to writ­ing) yet so involv­ing that an entire day goes by in a flash. Regard­less, I always pop out the oth­er side know­ing I was at my absolute cre­ative best. I was in the “zone” or as Mihaly Csik­szent­mi­ha­lyi called it in 1990, “the flow state.” And in a won­der­ful bit of syn­chronic­i­ty, not a lit­tle while lat­er, I have been charged with pre­sent­ing to you this exam­ple of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) cre­ativ­i­ty. It sim­i­lar­ly uses this under­stand­ing of the flow state to cre­ate.

In the above video, the Flow Machine devel­oped by François Pachet at Sony CSL-Paris has been fed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, and then asked to orches­trate “cov­er ver­sions” fol­low­ing the rules set down by a genre–say bossa nova or elec­tron­ic chill music–or a song itself, in this case being the Bea­t­les’ “Pen­ny Lane.”

Pre­vi­ous attempts to cre­ate ran­dom com­put­er music have result­ed in exact­ly that–random notes, drawn from a selec­tion deter­mined by a pro­gram­mer. But that isn’t how cre­ativ­i­ty works. When we cre­ate, we under­stand our para­me­ters already, sub­con­scious­ly, and not only that, we know what we and oth­ers have done before, what “push­es the enve­lope” com­pared to using a com­plete­ly wrong ele­ment, and what makes our own cre­ativ­i­ty unique. (If we dis­cov­er it and empha­size the lat­ter over and over, it’s called style.)

The Flow Machine project aims to under­stand style and treat it as a com­pu­ta­tion­al object through which oth­er infor­ma­tion can pass. That’s what we’re see­ing in the above video. For a more thor­ough expla­na­tion of Flow Machine, watch this video.

Sup­pos­ed­ly, this will help us poor human beings in the end, as it might (it’s nev­er explained how) help us get into our own flow state more read­i­ly.

But real­ly, that’s not what I’m think­ing about. I’m more imag­in­ing a night club some­time in the future where Bea­t­les androids play not just their hits, but the hits of oth­ers as if John, Paul, George and Ringo wrote them instead. (Yes, I know that has already been done. By humans.) And your local used record shop will have a lot of LPs full of clas­si­cal ver­sions of Bea­t­les hits.

It’s an inter­est­ing video, but I wouldn’t pack up your gui­tars yet folks!

via Tech Crunch

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cre­ativ­i­ty, Not Mon­ey, is the Key to Hap­pi­ness: Dis­cov­er Psy­chol­o­gist Mihaly Csikszentmihaly’s The­o­ry of “Flow”

Slavoj Žižek: What Ful­fils You Cre­ative­ly Isn’t What Makes You Hap­py

Slavoj Žižek Exam­ines the Per­verse Ide­ol­o­gy of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

There is a per­pet­u­al argu­ment among stringed instru­ment afi­ciona­dos about the eso­teric val­ue of so-called “tonewoods.” Cer­tain­ly, to most dis­crim­i­nat­ing ears, the dif­fer­ences between an acoustic gui­tar, man­dolin, or vio­lin made of sol­id spruce or maple and one made of ply­wood seem son­i­cal­ly obvi­ous. When it comes to elec­tric gui­tars, the dis­tinc­tions between mate­ri­als can seem more neg­li­gi­ble. In blind tests many of us might have some dif­fi­cul­ty telling the dif­fer­ence between an elec­tric gui­tar made of the finest woods and one made of cheap bal­sa, lucite, or even an oil can. (Not that dif­fer­ences don’t exist!) It’s hard­ly con­tro­ver­sial to point out that acoustic instru­ments depend upon their mate­ri­als and work­man­ship in ways elec­tric instru­ments don’t.

So how might dis­crim­i­nat­ing ears respond to an elec­tric, dig­i­tal­ly 3‑D print­ed acrylic vio­lin, based loose­ly on a real Stradi­var­ius? Can such an instru­ment repli­cate the sweet sus­tain of an acoustic vio­lin, Strad or oth­er­wise? You can judge for your­self in the demon­stra­tions here. Cre­at­ed by French engi­neer and musi­cian Lau­rent Bernadac, the “3Dvarius”—the world’s first 3‑D print­ed vio­lin—is per­haps, reports Wired, “a har­bin­ger of what’s to come for musi­cal instru­ments.” Crit­ics have shown how it falls far short of recre­at­ing the sound of a tra­di­tion­al instru­ment. (See vio­lin­ist Joan­na Wronko com­pare the two at a TEDx Ams­ter­dam talk here). And yes, the 3Dvarius may look “more like an avian skele­ton than a stringed instru­ment.” But it does have some advan­tages over tra­di­tion­al vio­lins made of wood.

For one thing, syn­thet­ic instru­ments are high­ly durable and light­weight (vio­lins and cel­los made of car­bon fiber have been on the mar­ket for sev­er­al years). For anoth­er, the 3Dvarius can indeed make some pret­ty sweet sounds when plugged into Bernadac’s rig, con­sist­ing of var­i­ous effects ped­als and loop­ers. At the top, see how he uses his set­up to cre­ate jazzy mul­ti-lay­ered, mul­ti-track arrange­ments of pop­u­lar songs with the 3Dvarius. And hear a few of those songs here, along with snazzy videos—including U2’s “With or With­out You,” the Game of Thrones and X‑Files themes, and “Se Bas­tasse Una Can­zone” by Ital­ian singer/songwriter Eros Ramaz­zot­ti. (See many more on Youtube.) The 3Dvarius web­site has a step-by-step expla­na­tion of how the instru­ment is made, from ini­tial design to sur­face treat­ment and final assem­bly.

Despite its name and inspi­ra­tion, the 3Dvarius does­n’t claim to actu­al­ly dupli­cate a Stradi­var­ius, a feat long thought impos­si­ble by even the finest mod­ern luthiers. Even com­put­er sci­en­tists admit: no mat­ter how good machines get at repli­ca­tion, replac­ing tra­di­tion­al, hand­made vio­lins with print­ed copies “would lead to dig­i­tal­ly cloned instru­ments,” writes Wired, “and the loss of son­ic char­ac­ter that makes music, well, music.” And it isn’t only son­ic char­ac­ter that mat­ters to musi­cians. Sur­pris­ing­ly enough, in blind tests, many vio­lin­ists can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between a Stradi­var­ius and a high-qual­i­ty new­er mod­el vio­lin, but these find­ings do not dimin­ish the Stradi­var­ius mys­tique. The look and feel of an instru­ment and its make and pedi­gree mat­ter. As musi­cian and writer Clemen­cy Bur­ton-Hill points out, much of our fas­ci­na­tion with the Stradi­var­ius vio­lin has to do with the “sto­ry of Stradi­vari,” as well as those of the musi­cians who have owned and played his instru­ments.

And though it may be pos­si­ble to come close to their tones with cheap­er mod­ern copies and dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, we still gush over Jimi Hen­drix’s Stra­to­cast­er or Jim­my Page’s Les Paul. The 3Dvarius, I’ll admit, is a very cool idea, but it’s hard to imag­ine a dig­i­tal­ly-pro­duced plas­tic arti­fact ever acquir­ing the same intan­gi­ble aura of not only the most famous instru­ments in the world, but also of unique, hand-craft­ed new instru­ments on their way to mak­ing his­to­ry. As Wal­ter Ben­jamin argued in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­ducibil­i­ty,” it’s the authen­tic­i­ty of “aura”—the spe­cif­ic traces of his­to­ry and the fin­ger­prints of artists and mas­ter craftsmen—that we trea­sure in art. These are qual­i­ties that elude the most advanced tech­no­log­i­cal process­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What Makes the Stradi­var­ius Spe­cial? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Sopra­no Voice, With Notes Sound­ing Like Vow­els, Says Researcher

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness