Boffins at Sony are working to develop artificial intelligence technology capable of composing original music.

Eduardo Reck Miranda, a researcher for the Sony Computer Science Laboratories, is working to create artificial intelligence agents capable of more than simply mimicking particular musical styles, EETimes reports (http://www.eet.com/at/news/OEG20021230S0015).

It's jolly clever stuff, and the possibility that the agents will come up with something more satisfying than the output from the current wave of Popstars- (http://www.popstarsonline.net)created Karaoke combos is certainly there.

And we'll listen to the results with interest: After all, there is no computer yet which passes the Turing tests (http://english.ucsb.edu/grad/student-pages/JDouglass/coursework/hyperliterature/constraint/turingtests.html), where a machine responses are indistinguishable from those of a human.

Sony's idea sounds uncommonly like the versificator (http://www.givemenotes.com/literature/1984notes01.html), machines used for the creation of music for the masses which feature in George Orwell (http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/anderson2.htm)'s dystopian novel 1984 (http://www.bookrags.com/notes/1984/SUM.htm). ®

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