Any manager dreams of them: they arrive punctually at concerts and recordings, they do not take drugs or get drunk, they do not destroy hotel rooms and they do not charge. They are the Z-Machines, three very capable Japanese robots: keyboardist, guitarist (he handles 12 spikes with his 78 fingers) and drums (22 dizzying arms to beat the drums) that have recorded a mini album with the songs composed for them by Squarepusher, a British producer of electronic music that explores if these androids can play "emotionally attractive" pieces.
There are other robotic bands like the Compressorhead, which give heavy metal. The question is: when will they compose their own songs instead of just reproducing those of humans?
There are machines that already do it. Iamus is a computer from the University of Málaga that has composed nine pieces of contemporary classical music. It has been programmed with certain instructions - for example, that a pianist can not play a 10-note chord with only one hand, since he only has five fingers - and from there and with a minimum of initial information it takes about 8 minutes to create a composition through an algorithm.
Artificial creativity
Art seems an exclusively human activity ... still. The painter robot e-David (University of Konstanz, Germany) is a computer-controlled arm that uses five types of brush strokes and 24 colors to paint pictures that no one would attribute to a computer. This artificial painter starts from a photo of the subject to be captured and calculates the movements necessary to turn an image into a drawing or painting of different styles. e-David is not aware, but he makes decisions and adjusts his movements according to what he is doing, which is already a gigantic advance.
There are more examples that indicate that we may get closer to the point where the machines can be called real artists. The Painting Fool (created by Simon Colton, Professor of Computing at Imperial College London) is software that has been taught to recognize human emotions. When you are given information (news, a story ...) create an image to illustrate it. The program chooses the color palette, the materials and the technique without any human intervention and paints paintings that have been successfully exhibited. Colton works on a literary version (Writing Fool) that writes poems on his own.
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