It Happened: "Daddy's Car" Is a Song Created By Artificial Intelligence

It looks like robots are one step closer to taking over the world.

Scientists at Sony's CSL research lab unveiled a new track called "Daddy's Car." If that sounds bizarre to you, you're not wrong. Although the song sounds like any run-of-the-mill track, it's actually created by the artificial intelligence software Flow Machines. The software draws from a massive database of songs to compose its music, combining small elements of many tracks to create new compositions. All someone has to do to create a song is choose a style of music or artist from the database and the software will make the score for them. The most represented genres are jazz and pop, but all types of music are represented. In this case, a musician named Benoît Carré wrote the lyrics and arranged the music.

Will Flow Machines replace musicians? Not anytime soon. "Daddy's Car," while pleasant, certainly doesn't sound like anything groundbreaking. It's very reminiscent of music from The Beatles, but more derivative than revolutionary. The songs also still require professional mixing and mastering, as the Flow Machines software doesn't yet have the capability to produce that itself.

Still, despite all these issues, the software itself is pretty remarkable. It already serves as a huge achievement in the burgeoning world of artificial intelligence. The software already serves as a useful tool for composers that could aide them in creating new music. Whether or not it rises up to displace them entirely remains to be seen, but for now, the technology is promising and fascinating.

You can listen to Flow Machines' track "Daddy's Car" in the video above.