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.

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-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, where a machine responses are indistinguishable from those of a human.

Sony's idea sounds uncommonly like the versificator, machines used for the creation of music for the masses which feature in George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984. ®

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