The Piano Inpainting Application (PIA) allows anyone to compose complex piano performances in a wide variety of styles. It is an A.I. assistant able to “fill in” missing parts of an expressive piano performance.
By dialoguing with such an assistant, it is now possible to generate new pieces quickly. It is available as an Ableton Live plugin, which allows musicians to seamlessly integrate PIA in their workflows, within a professional Digital Audio Workstation.
Compared to existing generative models for piano performances (e.g. MuseNet from OpenAI, Music Transformer from Google Magenta), PIA was designed to encourage collaboration between the artist and the A.I.
PIA deviates from these approaches which provide little control by focusing on simplicity, quick response time and user interaction. As a result, PIA can be seen as the first “piano A.I.” going beyond the sole purpose of being a scientific demo; it is meant to be usable by artists.
PIA allows the user to:
- Generate novel ideas from scratch
- Create transitions between two parts
- Regenerate a given part
- Propose new notes given user-defined onsets