Bach signed his name at the start of his Mass in B Minor — and it stayed hidden for 250 years. Music is an excellent vessel for coded messages. There’s so much going on in a piece of music, so many layers to hide messages beneath, they can be hard…

Eight weeks ago, my wife and I became parents. Like any new parents, we’ve found our lives totally transformed — yes, the obvious changes like the new (and fairly brutal) sleep schedule, but, much more than this, the sudden, undeniable knowledge that we would do absolutely anything for this tiny…

by Ed Newton-Rex and Hendrik Vincent Koops Earlier this year, we were on the judging panel for the first international AI song contest. Run by Dutch national broadcaster VPRO, and inspired by Eurovision, the contest brought together 13 teams who battled it out, in front of the public and us…

I’m often asked by people new to the field of Creative Artificial Intelligence (Creative AI) whether I can suggest any reading to introduce them to some of the concepts involved. That’s the motivation behind this post: to bring together a number of articles, demos and papers to serve as a…

This week, Amazon became the latest big tech company to enter the AI music composition space. There was lots of note in their announcement (check out the full video here). Below are seven quick takeaways. First, that’s now 4 of the ‘big 5’ tech companies who have publicly announced work…

Thanks to the rise of Agile methodology, and implementations like Scrum, effective processes for building products are well understood. But this understanding tends to break down when products rely heavily on research. …

A new solution to the enigma at the heart of Elgar’s most famous work. Over a few months between 1898 and 1899, Edward Elgar composed what has become one of the most famous pieces of classical music in the world, the Enigma Variations. Its fame is due in large part…

(Contains spoilers.) I went into Dunkirk with high expectations for the score. Whenever Christopher Nolan and Hans Zimmer collaborate you know you can expect big things, and this time in particular everyone had been raving about Zimmer’s use of something called the Shepard tone, a way of ratcheting up tension…