Computers create musical

  • March 4, 2016
Computers create musical

Alex Davies worked on the world's first computer-generated musical.

A Gates Cambridge alumnus has worked on the world’s first computer-generated musical.

The musical, Beyond the Fence, opened in London’s West End on 22nd February and runs until 5th March.

Commissioned by SkyArts, it is based on a big data statistical study of what makes a Broadway hit.

Alex Davies [2010] and colleagues in the Machine Learning Group at Cambridge University analysed the data, which included the emotional structure of a work, the number of actors involved and whether or not romance was important. Alex and a colleague worked on generating lyrics. About 15% of the lyrics in the musical were computer generated.

They used this data to develop a model of what was most likely to result in a successful musical. Researchers at Goldsmiths, University of London and the Complutense University of Madrid, took this model and generated characters and a plot, again using computers. The score was also written by computers under the aegis of Dr Nick Collins of Durham University and others.

Beyond the Fence is set in 1982 at the Greenham Common peace camp and involves a soldier finding true love through learning how to understand a child. Alex is currently a Machine Learning Specialist at ‎Google.

Latest News

Research impact award for Gates Cambridge Scholar

A Gates Cambridge Scholar is one of two winners of the 2023 Sandra Dawson Research Impact Award for his work on the economics of climate change earlier this month. The annual award was established through a generous donation from Professor Dame Sandra Dawson, a former Director of Cambridge’s Judge Business School. Winners are chosen based […]

AI system self-organises to resemble brains of complex organisms

A team of Cambridge scientists, co-led by a Gates Cambridge Scholar, have shown that placing physical constraints on an artificially-intelligent system – in much the same way that the human brain has to develop and operate within physical and biological constraints – allows it to develop features of the brains of complex organisms in order […]

Scholar wins history of science & medicine essay prize

A Gates Cambridge Scholar has won a prestigious essay competition about the history of early science with a treatise on evidence of knowledge exchange between the Ming-Chinese and Iberian conventions in the 16th century. The essay competition was run by the Early Sciences Forum of the History of Science Society and the Early Science and Medicine journal […]

Addressing the complex roots of environmental crime

Simone Haysom [2009] says her MPhil at the University of Cambridge helped to change her life course. While she had been interested in climate change and human geography as an undergraduate, doing the MPhil in Environment, Society and Development at an international university as part of the Gates Cambridge cohort broadened her perspective and set […]