Facebook recently announced a new app that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to make live videos look like art. In September 2016, AI was used to judge a beauty contest called Beauty.Ai 2.0 with controversial results, primarily that the AI selected mostly contestants with white skin.
That same month on September 20, 2016, AI entered the Louvre in Paris and was the center of a AI driven symphonic experience called Symphonologie.
Symphonologie was performed by a 50 person orchestra conducted by Mathieu Lamboley in three movements. The entire symphony, created by Accenture Strategy (NYSE: ACN), was inspired by data from sentiment and top business and technology new stories on the internet.
“To demonstrate powerful outcomes that live at the intersection of business and technology, we looked to another intersection: data and art,” said Mark Knickrehm, Group Chief Executive, Accenture Strategy. “Symphonologie reveals, in a totally new way, the hopes, fears, ambitions and projections of today’s world of business. It’s a prime example of how strategy and technology together can unlock a new way to view the world.”
To create Symphonolgie, a team used AI techniques based on natural language processing and machine learning to analyze sentiment from 220,000 words of text. Next, algorithms helped analyze the sentiment surrounding those business topics like cyber-security and Internet of Things. That sentiment was distilled into melodic patterns.
The human composer (Lamboley) scored a three-movement symphony from those patterns. Those orchestral arrangements from Lamboley were passed to a data visualization team who cross-referenced key moments of the music with the sentiment insight from the source material. From this, they created a digital art piece that expressed the sentiment through data visualization created in real time and synchronized with Symphonlogie.
Knickrehm says by combining their insights into what’s disrupting business through AI with a creative coder, a human composer and a data visualist, they were able to create a visual, symphonic experience.
"AI will never replace an artist or a composer but it can inspire new ideas and enhance creativity," said Knickrehm.
