Meta-art: Can a Robot Write a Symphony?

V–A–C Sreda online magazine brings a new episode in the series of podcasts dedicated to games, produced in collaboration with the Tolk audio platform.

This podcast issue focuses on neural networks. Will new technologies replace real artists and musicians? What is the potential of neural networks for music and creative industries? How is the process of music generation arranged and which mobile apps can be used for it? These are among the questions discussed by Maxim Shibaev, V–A–C Sreda editor, Oleg Makarov, media and sound artist, Alexander Senko, composer and sound designer, Artem Sanakoev, senior research fellow at Meta* and administrator of the Telegram channel AI News, and Gleb Ardabiev, musician, sound engineer at Sber and member of the “Moscow Noise Manufactory” formation.

As an experiment, we asked the speakers to guess which pieces of music in this episode were created by human and which—by machine. The background sounds and noises you hear in the podcast, as well as most of the host's text, were generated by a neural network.