People make things. You make things. Most of the time you make Very Serious Things™️ that help your bosses sell more shoes or saxophones or those tiny coffee packets. And that’s good, because you gotta eat and stuff. But something else has gotta eat, too: your brain. Music is creation, art is creation, code is creation. I think it’s important to goof around with code sometimes, or make things that let other people goof around with code. And sometimes, that becomes the Very Serious Thing™️. Magenta.js is one of these things; let's talk about it! Monica Dinculescu works on Magenta, in Google Brain, where she makes generative music and art with Machine Learning. youtube
YOUTUBE _0ij8vY2gzE "Music and Art with ML" Monica Dinculescu, JSConf Asia 2019
.
Since I'm newly interested in how humans can use tools to change how they can think, this talk is unexpectedly inspiring.
Some of the excitement is dulled after talking with a musician and technologist who was unimpressed with the talk and especially the music. It turns out to be quite common, in his experience, for advanced musicians to build their own instruments. At some point the tools they have for expressing their own music become a limitation to expression and they begin to extend the tools.
I do still like this as a preview of how we humans might apply machine learning to extend our instruments. But I was long ago persuaded of Englebart's vision of augmented intelligence. :-)
See also How a Cockpit Remembers