How A.I. Is Creating Building Blocks to Reshape Music and Art

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In the mid-1990s, Douglas Eck worked as a database programmer in Albuquerque while moonlighting as a musician. After a day spent writing computer code inside a lab run by the Department of Energy, he would take the stage at a local juke joint, playing what he calls “punk-influenced bluegrass” — “Johnny Rotten crossed with Johnny Cash.” But what he really wanted to do was combine his days and nights, and build machines that could make their own songs. “My only goal in life was to mix A.I. and music,” Mr. Eck said.

It was a naïve ambition. Enrolling as a graduate student at Indiana University, in Bloomington, not far from where he grew up, he pitched the idea to Douglas Hofstadter, the cognitive scientist who wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book on minds and machines, “Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.” Mr. Hofstadter turned him down, adamant that even the latest artificial intelligence techniques were much too primitive. But over the next two decades, working on the fringe of academia, Mr. Eck kept chasing the idea, and eventually, the A.I. caught up with his ambition.

“It’s about creating new ways for people to communicate," - Douglas Eck

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