MSiA students Kate Overstreet, Alyssa Everding, Patty Lu and Kelsey DeMott took home the grand prize in the Deep Learning and Data Visualization Poster Session. The team used a sophisticated analytics technology called Deep Learning to generate original musical lyrics by teaching the computer to read thousands of songs and learn the structure of lyrics using the Keras deep learning library. The generated lyrics exhibited a great deal of creativity and humor, as well as being mostly grammatically correct. Occasionally, the computer would even invent new but plausible slang terms and create chorus-like segments. Their project was appreciated by over 50 participants in the first annual Deep Learning competition, and attendees were invited to test a live demo of their system generating musical lyrics for various topics.
This work comes at a very transformative time for Northwestern, as new initiatives in data science are transforming the way that the University does research in broad areas including the arts. The project was part of a new course on Deep Learning (MSiA 490-30) taught by Dr. Ellick Chan. The team was both pleased and surprised to find that Google has recently been working on a similar project to create computer music using Deep Learning: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3077977/data-center-cloud/googles-magenta-project-just-wrote-its-first-piece-of-music-and-thankfully-its-not-great.html.
Please see below for the team’s winning research poster:
Prabash
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Songspk
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