SPEAKER 1: Hi there.
Professor Malan, Brian,
all the CS 50 community.
I'm a professional musician, a
classical guitarist specifically.
I've been taking CS
50 as an introduction
to coding during these
times where we're staying
at home trying to develop a hobby
and potentially a side profession,
let's say.
And just to say it's surpassed any
expectations I had about programming
and just how exciting it could be.
So my question is what have you seen
as overlaps between arts and coding,
and are there perhaps overarching trends
that you may have observed perhaps
amongst your CS 50 alumni community?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, it's
a really good question.
Brian, do you want to speak to this
first, given your musical tendencies?
BRIAN: Yeah, sure.
So speaking more generally about
the arts, David and I actually,
a couple years ago now,
were teaching a class
on programming in the
digital humanities.
So the digital humanities
is an entire field
that's really all about the intersection
of humanities, and the arts,
and computing.
So there's a lot of interesting
work that's going on there.
With regards to music specifically, CS
50 actually had a problem about music
a couple of years ago.
I'll paste the link to that
problem there if you're interested.
SPEAKER 1: Thanks.
BRIAN: But that was a program
where you could write some C code--
oh, I see David posted the link too--
where you can write some C
code to actually generate
some music of your own based on
some representation of sheet music.
But especially now with
artificial intelligence,
the intersection between computation
and music is getting very interesting,
where there's actually artificial
intelligence-- in particular, variants
of neural networks-- that are able
to generate musical compositions that
are almost indistinguishable
from compositions
that a human might have
composed themselves.
One of the most famous ones
there is OpenAI's MuseNet, which
is a neural network that can be used.
I just pasted a link to it there.
But you can hear samples
of music that was
generated by artificial intelligence.
And this, I think, is one of
the really interesting powers
that some modern
techniques and artificial
intelligence are now able to do is they
can generate compositions like that.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah.
Suffice it to say too, there's this
intersection of computing and music
certainly when it comes
to consumer applications.
If you have Shazam, for
instance, on your phone.
This is a piece of software on iPhone
and Android that you can hit a button
and figure out what song is playing in
a restaurant, or at a friend's house,
or the like.
And it does that generally by quantizing
the music into small little signatures
or fingerprints that can then
be looked up in a database.
YouTube, and Facebook, and
others are using computing
to detect when copyright
has been violated
and someone has maybe
uploaded when they shouldn't
a copy of some song by looking at
patterns that uniquely identify
that song as well.
And at the risk of maybe embarrassing,
but hopefully, flattering Brian
himself is quite the musician.
And I just pasted into
the chat window 60 seconds
of Brian playing the piano on the
stage of Sanders Theater at Harvard.
And in fact, it was Brian's
talents a few years ago
that inspired that new music problem
set that he too pasted earlier.
