【A Thought of Ecstasy】

In a move that's guaranteed to inspire awe but A Thought of Ecstasyis really just laying the foundation for the robot takeover Elon Musk has been warning us about, IBM's artificial intelligence program Watson has helped write some music.

Alex Da Kid, a Grammy-winning producer, got all sorts of data from Watson that helped him craft the song "Not Easy," a collaboration with X Ambassadors, Elle King, and Wiz Khalifa.

So how did Watson help? Well, according to IBM:

Watson AlchemyLanguageAPI helped by analyzing five years of natural language texts including New York Times front pages, Supreme Court rulings, Getty Museum statements, the most edited Wikipedia articles, popular movie synopses and more. Once Watson had learned the most significant cultural themes, Watson Tone Analyzer read news articles, blogs and tweets to find out what people felt about them.

In addition to all of this fun stuff, Watson also analyzed lyrics from thousands of popular songs and the keys and chord progressions of those songs to create "an emotional fingerprint of music by year."

Watson also ingested album art and used a "cognitive cloud-based app" called Watson Beat that, with artist input, helps put together a musical composition.

Speaking to radio host Elvis Duran, Alex said of the song created with Watson, "My creative process starts with a conversation. And when I kind of understood what Watson could do, it could kind of take that conversation and that understanding of how people talk to each other and do that on a massive scale."

While Watson has been working on something like this for a while, there's no word on whether or not we'll see another matching of the platform and Nobel Prize-winning poet Bob Dylan, who appeared alongside Watson in an IBM commercial before apparently disappearing into the ether.

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