Creative Capabilities of Machine Learning: Evaluating music created by algorithms

The concept of creativity is an important part of human society and the continuous evolution of artificial minds has raised questions on creativity among machines. This aim of the this study is to explore machine learning algorithms’ ability to be creative. The study reported in this paper uses short samples of music generated by IBM Watson beats that are evaluated using expert assessment of 51 music teachers together with samples generated by humans as control samples. The results show that one of the machine learning generated samples showed the same level of creativity as the human generated samples. Hence, there are indications that today machine learning algorithms can create music that is hard to distinguish from human created music and can be considered creative.