Google has invented a virtual accompanist

Feed it the music in advance and this device is supposed to anticipate your every breath.

(Do let us know if it works for you.)

Here’s a summary:

Google’s latest artificial intelligence experiment is a music-playing piano bot that digests whatever keyboard melodies you give it and tries to respond in kind. The neat tool is called AI Duet, and it’s part of an ongoing push from Google’s Creative Lab division to help the public familiarize themselves with AI and all the ways it can mimic human behavior — and even create art. A collection of music-focused AI tools were first shown off last fall, but now AI Duet in particular has been made available to the public.

AI Duet works by taking the notes you play using your computer’s keyboard and running it through a neural network that has been trained using machine learning with scores of examples. The neural net then looks for melodic and rhythmic patterns it can identify. Because it understands concepts like timing and staying in key from a hard data perspective — and not because it was ever explicitly told what to do — it’s able to then generate its very own organic melodies that, hopefully, sound like a direct response to your own. It was created by musician and computer scientist Yotam Man in collaboration with the Creative Lab and Magenta, Google’s open-source computational music and art project.