Magenta is an open-source project exploring the role of machine learning as a tool in the creative process. We've been running in public (g.co/magenta) for over four years. This talk will look back at successes and frustrations in bringing our work to creators, mostly musicians. I'll also talk about some current and future work. Magenta is made up of several ML researchers and engineers on the Google Brain team, which focuses on deep learning. Our successes have mostly been in the area of new algorithm development (NSynth, MusicVAE, Music Transformer, DDSP and others). Our frustrations have been in finding ways to make these models useful for music creators. The talk will be a casual example-driven discussion about what worked and what didn't, and where we're going next. Spoiler: we have been humbled by the user interface challenges encountered when building tools for creative work. My main message for Vector Institute is that machine learning alone is not enough to address a challenge like enabling new forms of creativity -- you need to think about what artists really want and how to communicate with them.

Douglas Eck is a Principal Scientist at Google Research and a research director on the Brain Team (https://research.google/teams/brain/). His work lies at the intersection of machine learning and human-computer interaction (HCI). Doug created and helps lead Magenta (https://magenta.tensorflow.org/), an ongoing research project exploring the role of machine learning in the process of creating art and music. He is also a leader of PAIR (https://pair.withgoogle.com/), a multidisciplinary team that explores the human side of AI through fundamental research, building tools, creating design frameworks, and working with diverse communities. Doug is active in many areas of basic machine learning research, including natural language processing (NLP) and reinforcement learning (RL). In the past, Doug worked on music perception, aspects of music performance, machine learning for large audio datasets and music recommendation. He completed his PhD in Computer Science and Cognitive Science at Indiana University in 2000 and went on to a postdoctoral fellowship with Juergen Schmidhuber at IDSIA in Lugano Switzerland. Before joining Google in 2010, Doug was faculty in Computer Science at the University of Montreal (MILA machine learning lab) where he became Associate Professor. For more information see http://g.co/research/douglaseck.