A marimba-playing robot with four arms and eight sticks is writing and playing its own compositions in a lab at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The pieces are generated using artificial intelligence and deep learning.

Researchers fed the robot nearly 5,000 complete songs—from Beethoven to the Beatles to Lady Gaga to Miles Davis—and more than 2 million motifs, riffs, and licks of music. Aside from giving the machine a seed, or the first four measures to use as a starting point, no humans are involved in either the composition or the performance of the music.

The first two compositions are roughly 30 seconds in length. The robot, named Shimon, can be seen and heard playing them here and here.

Ph.D. student Mason Bretan is the man behind the machine. He’s worked with Shimon for seven years, enabling it to “listen” to music played by humans and improvise over precomposed chord progressions. Now Shimon is a solo composer for the first time, generating the melody and harmonic structure on its own.

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