Jukedeck uses artificial intelligence to create royalty free music – but will it ever compose a symphony?

In what could be a dangerous development for working composers, a team of composers, producers, engineers, academics and machine learning experts have been developing machine learning technology that can compose and adapt music.

“We’re building a system that uses its knowledge of how to write music,” Ed Newton-Rex, CEO of Jukedeck, told the BBC, “which it’s learnt using a technique called machine learning, it uses that knowledge to kind of on-demand write new music from scratch.”

^{JukeDeck CEO Ed Newton-Rex}

“At it’s core is this machine learning system that’s built on what are known as deep neural networks,” he said. “And these are systems that essentially learn from data.”

But how does the technology work? “You feed in loads of music and it learns kind of the probabilities of what notes should come after what other notes,” explains Newton-Rex.

^{ICON – Irene of Thessaloniki by Finnish filmmaker Joonas Nieminen, which uses music created by JukeDeck}

And the technology is already very popular. “What we’ve been using it for now is providing YouTubers, generally amateur...