Listen to the first pop song composed entirely by Artificial Intelligence

by: Michael Cooper Sep 22, 2016

Robots: what can’t they do? In these advanced times, the list is comprised almost solely of “return affection” and, in Daft Punk’s case, “go on tour.” Sony is doing their part to whittle it down further by releasing a song from their project Flow Machine — the first ever track composed solely by artificial intelligence.

Run by the tech giant’s CSL Research Laboratory, Flow Machine analyzed a gargantuan trove of sheet music from a disparate set of genres and then wrote the track after being given a prompt from a human. The AI wrote the melody and accompaniment before, in a conspicuously veteran move, handing off the lyrical, production, and mixing tasks to a human: French composer Benoît Carré.

The track is entitled “Daddy’s Car” and affects a style similar to The Beatles and The Beach Boys’ work from the ’60s. It’s also the first track to be released from an expected album of AI-composed originals set for 2017.