How AI could compose a personalized soundtrack to your life

This movie was the main inspiration for AIVA. The main character is Theodore, a man who falls in love with an AI called Samantha. As an operating system, Samantha cannot take physical form; one day, she realizes that she and Theodore don’t have photographs of them as a couple. As a result, she decides to write pieces of music to capture the moments that she spends with her loved one, just like photographs would.

This book is an introduction to machine learning and, more specifically, deep learning. It covers all the basics that a researcher in those fields should know about, and thus was an inspiration not only for me but the rest of the team behind AIVA.

The score created by award-winning composer Howard Shore for The Lord of the Rings is recognized by music critics as some of the greatest film music ever written. The soundtrack has over one hundred original leitmotifs, making it by far the most thematically-rich of any cinematic work. This is probably the first human written score that closely embodies the idea of personalized music at large scale, with each major characters, cultures and geographies of the film having their own personalized theme.

Video games are often shunned because they get generalized as being bad influences and shallow. Journey is a game that defeats all stereotypes about games, and it also happens to have a score that is stirring, ambient, calming and a major driving force of emotional stimulation. The game itself spans over only two hours, while the soundtrack is one hour long, making it one of the only video game to have the closest thing to personalized music there is.