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I've pretty much given up trying to keep track of all the areas where artificial intelligence--AI--has surpassed human capabilities. AI systems now routinely beat even the most expert humans in many once-strictly human skills, from complex games such as chess and Go to more serious capabilities such as reading x-rays.
Experts keep reassuring us that although AI can beat us at more and more specific tasks or skills, it will be a while, maybe a long while, before an AI system achieves fully human or super-human general intelligence--Artificial General Intelligence or AGI. We'll see.
Hal, what's this piece of music?
Credit: Mixcloud
Recently, however, I stumbled on an AI ability that amazes me.
I like classical music and have been listening to it most of my life. Over the years I've made a game of challenging myself to identify whatever piece I happen to hear. I can usually get a piece that I've heard many times, for example one of Beethoven's symphonies or Rachmaninoff's piano concertos. Even if I don't recognize the specific piece, I can usually identify the composer, for example Scarlatti or Stravinsky. And if I can't ID the composer, I can usually glean something about a piece, for example that it's from the Baroque. the Romantic period or the 20th Century.
I'm sure there are many people who can do much better. I remember that my brother's piano teacher claimed he could recognize almost any classical piece from the first few notes. But I doubt that he or any other mere human can do what Google Assistant now does thousands or millions of times per day:
If you hear a classical piece being played, and if you have an Android smartphone, ask your Google Assistant, "What piece of music is this?" Usually within a few seconds, he/she/it/they will tell you the specific piece, the composer, AND THE GROUP, ORCHESTRA OR PERFORMER PLAYING IT.
So not just Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in B-flat, but that it's being played by the Venice Baroque Orchestra, and that the soloist is Giuliano Carmignola.
In order to be able to do this, this system must have "listened to" and "memorized" just about every recording of every piece of classical music (and other musical genres as well), and be able to home in on the specific piece and the specific recording from a few-second-long snippet from anywhere in the piece, all within a few seconds.* As the Google team who developed this system write, ". . . we didn't want people to wait 10+ seconds for a result."
You can read about how Google Assistant pulls off this superhuman feat at this Google Blog post. The gist is that it maps the few seconds of music that it samples through your smartphone into a series of overlapping 128-dimensional "fingerprints," which are then matched through a two-step process with the most similar fingerprints in the Assistant's constantly updated database of tens of millions of pieces.
Smart as it is, the system isn't perfect. I ran an experiment asking it to identify 100 classical pieces played on the radio. It correctly identified 97 of them, but it "only" got the group or soloist right on 74 of those. When the Assistant gets something wrong, you can ask it to try again. That brought its piece recognition up to 98 percent, and its ID of the group, orchestra or soloist up to 78 percent. Interestingly, most of its mistakes on orchestras, groups or soloists were on extremely well known pieces, popular workhorses that have been recorded dozens or hundreds of times.
As is true throughout the AI world, the Google music recognition team is constantly working to make their system even smarter. "We still think there's room for improvement though," they blog, "we don't always match when music is very quiet or in very noisy environments, and we believe we can make the system even faster."
Right now I'm listening to a very familiar piece, The Sorcerer's Apprentice by Paul Dukas. I recognized it right away, and of course so did Google Assistant. But it really pisses me off that the Assistant didn't just identify the piece, but could tell that it was the version recorded by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra led by Kent Nagano. Damned showoff.
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*To be fair, it appears that the Shazam app, now owned by Apple, has pretty much the same capabilities, although it seems a tad slower to me.
