(dramatic music)
What if we asked scientists
to come up with something truly unique?
The first piece of musical theater generated by computers.
♪ The hills are alive with the sound of ♪
(cacophonous electronic music)
We've called this endeavor the Experiment.
I thought it was bonkers.
For us, it was wonderful.
Our international team of scientists
conducts a groundbreaking study
into what makes a hit musical.
How much death?
(laughing)
And then makes one.
I've just generated a show tune by my program.
I call my program Android Lloyd Webber.
Still gibberish.
This machine is talking to a machine
in Madrid, in Cambridge, and in Slovenia now.
(group vocalizing)
A top cast and creative team
will stage it in London's West End.
Standing by then, please.
♪ Soggy and ♪
This is a meeting
of science and art as never before.
And if the show's ghastly, it's not really my fault.
Even if it fails, it's necessary to experiment.
And bridging the two
are Benjamin Till and Nathan Taylor,
musical theater writers who, on this occasion,
will take dictation from the computers.
Why would you want a computer to write a musical?
To see if it can.
Despite tears and tempers in a changing world.
Nasty beast that we're visiting,
could easily put me out of a job.
♪ And that's the point, yeah ♪
We can use computers to do
crazy, exciting, creative things.
The Experiment makes only one demand.
(applause)
Here we go, five, six, seven, and.
♪ Doe, a deer, a female deer ♪
♪ Ray, a drop of golden sun ♪
Let's see your arms!
Musical theater is big business,
with millions of ardent fans worldwide.
It's made a lot of people very happy.
And some, very rich.
I really, really like musicals.
♪ I'm in love, ooh ♪
But despite the love, the stats are sobering.
Just one show in ten makes any money.
And two out of ten lose everything.
People know very well what they like
and even talk about a good formula,
but no one has ever really tried
to crack it scientifically, until now.
("Together, Wherever We Go")
North London.
♪ Wherever we go ♪
♪ Whatever we do ♪
♪ We're gonna go through it together ♪
Benjamin Till and Nathan Taylor
are not scientists.
Rather, they're an award-winning writer-composer duo,
so passionate about musicals that they even
turned their own wedding into one.
♪ How like the gays to marry in a musical ♪
For the Experiment,
their task will be to curate the computer's creations
into a script and musical score
ready for humans to perform.
My thing is, you know, I'm a composer,
I write entirely from the perspective of emotion,
and yes there's a little bit of technique
in there as well, but I genuinely don't think
you can teach a computer to feel.
But maybe it's not about teaching a computer to feel.
Maybe it's about teaching a computer
what makes humans feel stuff.
The Experiment may now begin.
First, like with all experiments, we need some data.
So our quest to make musical history begins where else,
the Centre for Mathematical Sciences
at Cambridge University.
♪ So prepare for the chance of a lifetime ♪
♪ Be prepared for sensational news ♪
♪ A shining new era ♪
♪ Is tip-toeing nearer ♪
♪ And where do we feature ♪
♪ Just listen to teacher ♪
When this idea was first suggested,
I thought it was bonkers, really.
A musical's sort of soft and fluffy things,
and I'm interested in hard science.
But then, I realized well, you can measure
the success of a musical, and you can measure
various factors about the structure
and the content of a musical,
so why not then use our statistical techniques
that enable us to predict outcomes
to try to predict the success of a musical?
♪ One, two, three, four ♪
Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter
and Dr. James Lloyd are experts
in statistics and machine learning.
Gather enough data about musicals,
and they might be able to advise what
and what not to put in ours.
Over months, the team harvested data on over 1,700 musicals.
All of it was fed to their computer algorithms
to see if anything might be predictive of success.
There are so many different types
of data that relate to musicals.
You've got the big databases of all the musicals
and how long they lasted and how much money they took.
You've got databases of what the reviewers said
and the synopses written about the musicals.
And then, to get the emotional content,
and how people respond to them,
you go to collect your own data.
We've done all that, and I think created a database
of the kind that's never existed before.
First, every musical
was plotted on the same graph.
Based on critical or commercial success,
they're split into four groups.
Analyze this data to find out if any factors
differentiate the hits from the flops,
and we can make the first decisions about the new show.
Initially, the statistics confirm the blindingly obvious.
90% of musicals contain a love story.
Also according to our surveys,
90% of the musicals are set in the past.
65% of them have a happy ending.
And some conclusions can be drawn.
The thing that's most striking about this
is that the hits and the crowd pleasers
have greater proportion of happy endings
than the critically acclaimed and the flops.
Interesting.
The flops.
♪ Five, six, seven, eight ♪
Hours pass, and it's clear
analyzing the data won't deliver
one magical formula for success.
(upbeat big band music)
I like that, 'cause it seems so unlikely,
yet it's so clear.
But it will tell us
what's more or less predictive of landing a hit.
100,000 pieces of data about musicals in.
Analyzed.
And the Experiment now has a suggested recipe for success.
Our musical should be a love story,
feature a key death, be a quest
to overcome loss, and it must dance.
Multiple styles of music are better
than it all being rather too samey.
It needs to be set in the past,
and the 1980s look most promising.
We should avoid setting it in the USA.
Our lead will be female and our ending should be happy.
The list of ingredients goes on.
But clever mathematics will only get us so far.
Next, we must move from
computer analysis to computer creativity.
♪ I wanna be a producer ♪
♪ With a hit show on Broadway ♪
Top theater producer
Neil Laidlaw has joined the team.
♪ I wanna be a producer ♪
♪ Lunch at Sardi's every day ♪
He's secured just
the West End venue to stage our show.
The Arts Theatre, famous for its history
of radical, experimental works.
♪ I wanna be a producer ♪
♪ And drive those chorus girls insane ♪
What was it like for you hearing
the rather quirky aspect of what we're doing?
Well, I turned it down a number of times.
(laughing)
Mainly because I think it's the real unknown factor,
but when it came to it and I actually thought,
in 20 years time, am I gonna look back
and kick myself and go, why didn't I try it.
'Cause the bottom line is, I mean,
in some ways, it's completely liberating,
because if the show's ghastly, it's not really my fault.
And really what drew me in was the thought of,
but what could come out of it.
♪ God, I hope I get it ♪
♪ I hope I get it ♪
Hot on Neil's heels, the Experiment
has director Luke Sheppard in its sights.
The hope is that he, too, will be hooked
by the exciting unknowns of a computer generated show,
about which he currently knows nothing.
♪ How many people does he ♪
The key point is to come up with a musical
that is entirely written by computers.
Wow.
Okay.
Interesting.
When do we start?
(all laughing)
We don't expect that a computer,
you can push a button and out pops
West Side Story or My Fair Lady.
None of us know at this point how much of this is possible.
Is that something that causes you any problems?
It doesn't cause me any problems.
In fact, it draws together I think
a lot of the different areas that I tend to work in,
and I think the thrill of it potentially being
a failure is probably what makes it worth doing.
It'd be interesting to find out
what the kind of computer's voice is within that,
and how you engage in that dialogue.
One thing that we do think about a lot
is whether computers can be an actual creative partner.
Are they worth collaborating with?
Are they worth working with?
The computer programs are essentially,
they're in their infancy.
They're students and we are learning
how to make them more creative.
We are learning how to turn things around
from making computers creative
to letting computers develop their own creativity,
as if they were students.
♪ Let's start at the very beginning ♪
For the Experiment, we must now see
where the computers can get creative.
And just as humans do, it all starts
with the spark of an idea.
♪ Do, re, mi ♪
This team of academics
from London's Goldsmiths University
have agreed to introduce their very own
idea generating computer to the world of musicals.
It's our job to get software
to invent ideas, fictional ideas.
And so we are building this machine
called the What-If Machine, and it's designed
to invent fictions which possibly could be used
as the heart of cultural artifacts,
like short stories, poems, jokes,
and of course, musical theater pieces.
The What-If Machine offers endless ideas
for different kinds of story or character.
Its suggestions range from the brilliant to the barmy.
Spinning. (laughs)
What if a lordly brat was supposed to annoy
a sibling but couldn't because of
the embarrassing woman he had fallen in love with?
I mean, that is the most complicated, bizarre plot.
A lordly brat. Go, let's do it.
The computer relies on masses of data
about how stuff interacts in the real world.
Show me another love one, because we've been told
that there will be love in this.
Did the Cambridge team
tell you that, good. They told us that love was.
600 of the computer's
brand new ideas are ready for perusal.
Okay, Ben, find us our hit.
(laughing)
What if there was a poor boy who was born with a hop,
which made him very good at jumping,
thanks to which he became a very famous miner?
The computer analysis has already said
that ours will be a quest led by a female character,
involving a love story and death.
What we've sort of learned is that
the stakes need to be really high.
What if there was a wounded soldier
who had to learn how to understand a child
in order to find true love?
I like that one. -: Yeah, it's good.
There's some back here.
Over there? -: Yeah.
I found a great one.
What if there was a doctor who found a magical medicine
that would allow him to heal disharmony?
After quite some time treading the boards,
we have a shortlist of computer generated ideas
for our new musical.
I'm holding the best one in my hand, so.
I don't know, I may have it here.
But our experiment to create
a computer generated hit musical has come to Spain,
and is about to get a whole lot harder.
As with all great art, we need to tell a story.
(flamenco music)
Story telling is one of the most complex activities
that the human brain can engage on,
because it draws upon knowledge about the world,
knowledge about people, how people react,
about character, about personality,
about social norm, about emotions.
And this is very, very difficult.
Computer can only do it if we provide it
with enough information to know about these things.
Dr. Pablo Gervas is a world expert
in understanding the basic building blocks
that stories are made of.
Pablo's computer system, which he's called PropperWryter,
is fed a set of hit musical plots.
It works out if there are patterns
in how their stories are built,
and then starts to build plots entirely of its own.
We've decided to start with an abstract view of the story,
and try and find a core view
of what is happening in the story.
Things like someone falls in love,
or two people struggle against
one another, that sort of thing.
We've asked a whole lot of volunteers
to look at musicals and tell us
how they see these musicals in terms of
these big things happening.
With this data, Pablo can track
love, danger, or happiness developing
as any musical plot unfolds.
This is South Pacific in terms of these plot elements.
You can see the plot line there,
and how love evolves or hate, there's a spike of hate--
Why would the spike of hate be there?
Well that'd be the end of act one
where Nellie realizes that he was married
to a Polynesian lady before.
Yeah, the racist bit. -: Ah, the racist bit.
It's labeled as class differences.
Right, there we are, then.
Click here and you get what the system's put together,
which is basically a sequence.
So it's adding its own information.
It's trying to make a coherent plot,
out of what you've given it.
Click again, it will look for another combination.
In each case it's building a new plot.
The most important part of getting a musical right,
for both of us, I think I'm right in saying,
is getting the story structure underpinning everything else.
Despite never having been tested before,
Pablo's plot-generating computer
will deliver the backbone of our new show.
("9 to 5")
Back in London, at Human HQ,
it's finally time for Ben and Nathan
to make some big decisions.
First, we need our basic idea.
Which what-if will they go for?
What if there was
a wounded soldier who had to learn
how to understand a child in order to find true love?
It's got such romance in it,
and it's. Totally.
Our musical has its big idea.
The Experiment's method for deciding
the real-world inspiration for
the musical is perfectly simple.
Put all the keywords from the computer's idea
into a search engine, along with possible settings,
and let the algorithm suggest where to find our female lead.
Alright.
Did you mean (laughs).
When Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp Songbook comes up.
No, you've got to write your own.
No, I know, but.
♪ We don't want your cruise ♪
♪ We have life to lose ♪
♪ It's not too late to choose ♪
♪ Jump down, Greenham ♪
Yay.
Happy?
Yeah, I'm really happy. (laughs)
Are you gonna cry?
From the data,
our musical has its unexpected setting.
Greenham Common Air Base was the site of
the largest women's peace camp in British history.
Established in 1981, the protest aimed
to prevent the US Air Force
sighting nuclear cruise missiles there.
Quite a lot of my childhood was spent on a commune
in Bedfordshire, which was run by CND women.
The idea that a computer can lead me home
to something that is of deep significance,
personal significance, is actually quite extraordinary.
♪ At the end of the day you're another day older ♪
With a basic idea and a setting,
it's time to use PropperWryter, Pablo's machine,
to generate the best possible story.
♪ What is it for ♪
♪ One day less to be living ♪
From the beginning, we're doing--
♪ At the end of the day you're another day colder ♪
Then, maybe we have a plot.
So on the wall now, we have a series of timelines,
which we've been creating over the last couple of weeks.
We have the Greenham Common timeline,
which is at the top, which tells us
what happened in what month, what year.
And then we have the Cambridge timeline,
which tells us what we need
to achieve overall in our musical.
And then we have the idea of this soldier and the child,
which has now been fleshed out in pink by Pablo's machine.
So this basically, this is pure.
This is all computers.
We now have to try and work out
what does this dictate for us.
(upbeat music)
It's time to share
the exciting news with Neil and Luke,
our show's producer and director.
The minute I saw Greenham, I thought,
why's no one set a musical there before?
The computers have worked hard,
but it's the human who've had to make the choices
and they've a huge task ahead.
Because the individual components of software
that have been used in this project
don't have an awareness about the bigger picture,
don't have an awareness about
what each of the other things are doing,
you need humans in the loop to say,
actually, that's the storyline I want.
That's the chord sequence I want.
That's the lyric I want.
Because they all fit together.
There's a lot there for us to go and get our teeth into.
There's also a lot for us to work through.
It's so exciting.
Every decision we make needs to come back
to the sets of data that got us there in the first place.
And the music?
Who knows.
There'll be as much of it as we can possibly provide.
Music to my ears, just without the music.
(laughing)
It's coming.
♪ Write what you know, so they say ♪
♪ All I know is I don't know what to write ♪
♪ Or the right way to write it ♪
♪ This is big, lady, don't screw it up ♪
♪ This is not some little vaudeville I'm reviewing ♪
For the Experiment,
with what feels like a winning show in hand,
the next challenge, this being
a musical after all, are the songs.
Specifically, their lyrics.
♪ 'Cause as I may have mentioned ♪
♪ I have no clue what I'm doing ♪
Dr. James Lloyd and Dr. Alex Davies
are part of the Cambridge team
that generated our recipe for success.
Being quite extraordinarily smart,
they'll be providing a new computer system
to which Ben and Nathan will soon be shackled.
We were really interested in looking into
some advances in neural network techniques
that have happened recently.
In understanding language and to get a bit more
of a handle on this, we decided
to try and teach the computer to write poetry.
And so we just--
Just like that. -: Just like that.
The reason that we call it a neural network
is because its architecture, or the way it's built,
is based on the low-level architecture of a brain.
This computer currently has poetry on its mind.
This is after reading 200 poems,
we said, please try and generate some poetry,
and it does this.
That screen actually makes me feel sick.
(laughing)
So it hasn't done much, but it's learned
some common letters, you can see there are lots of,
quite a few vowels, Ts, Ss, Hs, that sort of thing.
10,000 poems later.
Searching the forest of blood.
All stars tattered through a clock from the moon.
My god!
That's fabulous.
Brilliant.
I'd be really interested to see if one could
put the entire canon of musical theater lyrics into it
and see what it starts to write from there.
Shall we see what it does?
Have you done it?
Yep. -: Amazing.
(laughing)
A girl is a carnival star that's been born.
(laughing)
That's brilliant.
And the figure is drunk, and more.
And the world is dead and so-so.
The friends are long ago and the stars were blown away.
Wow. -: That is brilliant.
Our new lyricist in training
can only be of so much use without
the last part of the Experiment, music.
♪ Not a day goes by ♪
We begin with Dr. Bob Sturm.
He's a specialist in machine listening.
♪ When does it end ♪
To get a computer to listen to music as humans do,
is an extremely difficult challenge.
The way our ears work, we want to mimic that
as much as we can so we get an idea of what's playing.
Is it a musical note?
And we build these conceptions higher and higher
to reach chords and eventually melodies
and styles or genres.
It's a very complex process.
Bob is here because
once computers can listen to musicals,
then they can start to learn how to write them.
So we have Abby's recording here,
and what I'm going to show you
is how we make a machine listen to the music
and pick apart what we're interested in.
These are frequencies, but let's
make this more musically meaningful.
So we can break all of these frequencies down
into the 12 notes of the scale.
We can now perform a chord analysis,
and it's saying, oh, there's a lot
of notes in here in common with D major.
It is, yeah.
There's your A, there's your D, and there's your F sharp.
Playing the computer's chords
along to the original song shows
the computer heard it right.
There's a D, D, yeah.
(Ben plays piano chords)
Interesting.
When it comes to music,
Ben's relationship with computers is a little strained.
I use computers as much as I need to use computers.
As much as they can help me directly.
So from the perspective of whether or not
I think a computer is capable of writing music,
well yes, I hope they are, for this project.
The rest of me hopes they're not at all,
for my own life, for my own career.
Because this nasty beast that we're visiting
could easily put me out of a job.
♪ Gonna buy me a ticket ♪
♪ And ride on that B & O ♪
In search of computer music,
there's no need for Silicon Valley when you have Durham.
(dramatic piano music)
Dr. Nick Collins is a leading researcher
and composer of computer generated music.
So I'm pretty sure what you were playing
just then was written by a computer,
but only because I'm sitting here
with you now and you chose to play that.
You're quite right that the pieces
that I just played to you were created
via the medium of a computer.
How much do you know about musical theater?
I've been to the odd musical theater show in my life,
but I would by no means claim to be an expert,
and I guess that's why you're here.
What I have got is quite a large amount of data.
Bob's team's machine
listened to hundreds of musical theater songs.
Nick used that data to teach his computer about musicals.
And with that, it can begin to compose.
This is its first try.
And as you can see, I've just generated
a show tune by my program,
I call my program Android Lloyd Webber.
That is a crackingly awful pun.
Thank you.
You can see that it's a bit stuck initially on one note.
Although that is not necessarily a bad thing.
Yeah?
(piano music)
So we have the particular bar here that goes.
(piano music)
What I'm not picking up from it
is any recognizable chord progressions.
Which is something that I think a lot of popular music,
particularly musical theater, is based on.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so when I run this program,
every time I run it we get back a totally different tune.
(piano music)
And so on.
The sort of thing I was writing when I was about eight.
Maybe? Maybe?
How do you then turn that into something that sounds good?
Ben and Nick spend the afternoon
exploring Android's prolific compositional strengths
and weaknesses before getting to
a rather important question.
What is it about computer writing music
that you find so compelling?
There's all sorts of reasons to do it.
One is that you can make new music,
and perhaps make new music in ways
that you yourself wouldn't have thought of.
If I was to die in the next five minutes,
in a certain sense my programs would survive me.
So there's a part of myself
that's encapsulated within that code.
One of the reasons why I think I do what I do
is because it's about legacy
and leaving the world something that I created,
something that's mine that
other people can enjoy, I suppose.
But I can flood the world with pieces
that I've composed forever,
whereas you have a fixed base of pieces
that will become diminishingly small
with respect to all the future composers.
Yes, but my soul exists in my music.
But my soul would exist in my programs
and through the program, into the further music.
How interesting.
(upbeat orchestral music)
The world's first computer generated musical
will soon take to the stage amid London's West End giants.
No machine currently exists that can
write convincing dialogue.
But that's not the case with music.
Musician Catherine Woolley will now perform
a world premier of our computer's compositions,
created especially for the Experiment.
Okay.
So this is the very first one
that the computer sent through.
(gentle piano music)
There are 200 in the first batch,
each generated in a matter of seconds.
The computer, it would seem, is off to a good start.
This is number 6 of the second batch.
The team reviews several numbers,
looking for tunes to suit everything
from showstoppers to love songs.
Give us the same tune but with
something completely different.
(pleasant piano music)
So, again it's--
It's a beautiful delicacy.
I didn't know if we were gonna get
some random sort of like--
Discordant. -: Yeah.
And just sort of sitting there going,
I can hear elements of a musical there,
which is quite exciting.
As the composer in the room,
Ben pulls no punches.
I thought that was a shockingly awful melody.
This is not music that is good enough to be in a show.
This has to be distilled, properly distilled,
by a human being to actually turn that
into something that will be palatable in a musical.
But what we have to do,
is we have to honor what we signed up for.
What we can't now do is go,
we've had enough of the computer,
and we're just gonna go a separate way.
So we now have to find a way of navigating what we've got.
In order to do that, you have to invest.
You have to invest in it creatively.
I can't lie, I'm reasonably reassured.
I thought I was gonna come in here
and listen to some really discordant, bizarre stuff.
This is not a show.
There aren't songs there yet, but there's something.
There's something.
What's happening with this musical
is really quite a challenge.
Computer programs are being asked
to deliver something at a professional level.
In some ways it's a little bit cruel,
because we've only really been looking at
how computers can be creative for a short amount of time,
whereas people have been being creative for centuries.
As the field of computational creativity progresses,
and it does raise some interesting philosophical questions,
we will see an increasing amount of work
which is exploring the relationship
between the human creative and the machine.
And then the question becomes, how much agency,
how much autonomy, do we want to give
the machine in the creative process?
(mysterious music)
As a writer of music, you absolutely
are going to want it to be awful.
Absolutely, because the,
the end result of it being wonderful,
or too wonderful, is actually unacceptable.
Therefore, maybe I was a little more
harsh on it than I possibly could have been.
And we fell into the trap
of falling in love with the piece,
and naturally, wanting and needing to take ownership of it.
It's not ours to play with in many respects,
we're a big part of it, but obviously
the Experiment is what's going on here.
(uplifting music)
The Experiment demands that Ben and Nathan,
with Catherine's assistance,
begin to work their way through
our computer composer's prolific output.
(Ben vocalizing)
That's quite nice.
A great song has to get you very quickly.
(Catherine laughs)
In a musical theater song, often there's a verse,
a short intro of some kind, that is intriguing.
It needs to tease you, it needs to say,
I'm onto something interesting,
I'm going somewhere, stay with me, stay with me.
This is the phrase I'm interested in.
(Catherine plays piano notes)
A hook is smaller than a chorus, smaller than a verse.
It's just a little thing that get you.
I mean, that's really nice to--
It is.
Jesus Christ Superstar begins with that fantastic,
♪ Bom bom bom, bom pa dum pa dum ♪
Immediately I found myself, when I first heard that, going.
Weeks pass and progress is slow.
Android's songs deliver melodies, but they lack structure.
I want to know that it doesn't just
keep returning to, ba ba ba, ba ba ba ba.
Just something that goes somewhere.
I know. -: Takes you somewhere.
Android doesn't quite come up
with really neatly, metrically packaged songs.
It tends to be a bit more freeform in what it does.
But there's a really valuable research experiment
that's being conducted here.
(gentle piano music)
From the music our team finds,
they must build 16 full songs.
I'm losing what's left,
honestly. Yeah, me too, actually.
We have only got through 229 bars out of
1,488. But already my brain feels
like I can't filter anything.
We've got two weeks before we go
into rehearsals with a team of actors,
and there is nothing to play with.
And working with
Android's music is just the start.
♪ I'm calm, I'm cool ♪
♪ A gibbering fool ♪
♪ Is something I'd never become ♪
♪ When thunder is rumbling ♪
♪ And others are crumbling ♪
♪ I hum, mm-hmm ♪
So now you're a song with you
the answer's like that and you're in love.
That's not a coherent sentence.
Ben and Nathan are scouring
the handiwork of the Cloud Lyricist,
a computer system built for the Experiment
that writes lyrics.
Its first hard copy submission numbers 20,000 lines.
By reading 7,000 musical theater songs, it learned to write.
But not quite how we would.
Individually, they all make sense.
I want our moment, and I will love you.
But what if you can't see.
I give into facts and life is beautiful.
I have seen the love and I have to know, is my phone.
Even if they give you a stroke of absolute genius,
they can never follow that up
with anything that's associated to that.
Whether that's a melody that develops
like a normal melody would develop,
or whether it's a sentence that develops
like a normal sentence would develop.
They do not think in the same way as human beings.
Every new thought is a new thought.
It's for this reason that Ben and Nathan
have had to write the script for the musical.
But the Experiment requires that they incorporate
as many computer generated lyrics
as possible into the new songs.
In the future, as these systems improve,
they'll be able to write longer
and longer stretches of text.
And eventually, there's no fundamental reason
why they wouldn't be able to generate
entire stories, entire songs.
However, the question would then be,
what do we want to use those systems for?
Would we really want to generate a musical every second,
or perhaps do we use these systems in a different way,
to potentially create new art forms
that we haven't even thought of yet.
♪ Another opening, another show ♪
With just three months until curtain up,
the Experiment must now shift up a gear.
♪ Another opening of another show ♪
A team of actors and creatives
have gathered to workshop what's been written so far,
and to test how it goes down with a real, live audience.
♪ Another opening of another show ♪
We've written six songs now.
We've got a whole script.
We've got a whole cast of actors.
So we're really excited.
You know, by the end of this week,
we will have worked out whether or not this is any good.
♪ Another opening of another show ♪
The cast face the week ahead
with no idea where this show has come from.
Because this is unlike any other show in history.
And the reason it's unlike any other show in history
is because it is the first piece
of musical theater generated by computers.
Cool! -: Yeah.
(laughing)
Everything from the premise, the plot,
the characters, the structure, the setting,
has come from computer technology.
Now, has anyone got any initial responses or questions?
(laughing)
Was there computer generated casting?
No, you are all here as artists,
and you're here because we think
you're the right people to shape the material.
(vocalizing)
The new team are warming up
for a vocal challenge like none other before.
They're about to be given a taste
of a computer generated song, unseen by Ben and Nathan.
We wanted to look at something
in its purest form from a computer.
So we have a piece of material.
It's by Android Lloyd Webber.
(laughing)
For one time only,
the company will learn a song that is pure computer music,
composed to pure computer lyrics.
So press the button, and this is what comes out.
So it goes, one, two.
♪ Time is on the tree ♪
♪ He's a man who can shame ♪
♪ A shadow of melody ♪
♪ Me has so that the shade ♪
The Experiment shows how hard it is
for a computer to write lyrics or music,
and combining the two is even harder.
Instead, it's our collaboration between computers
and humans that may get us our hit.
♪ Now there's only tomorrow ♪
Two of Android's melodies,
found in Ben and Nathan's creative garret,
form the heart of the first song the company will learn.
One, two.
♪ At our feet ♪
♪ Stop their hating ♪
♪ Show them now ♪
With one in five of its lines
from the Cloud Lyricist, Ben and Nathan have crafted
something a bit closer to what's needed.
♪ It's time to show them now ♪
♪ We are strong ♪
That's it, yeah. -: Come on, good.
♪ We shall not be moved ♪
♪ Hear our song ♪
I think the reason people involved in theater
do what they do is because they are human beings,
and they have a human emotional connection
to the story, to the characters, to the songs, to the dance.
And I just can't imagine how a computer,
I mean, prove me wrong.
I can't imagine how a computer is gonna move me.
The feeling, the pain and the pathos,
or the humor of a character.
♪ You make it demonstrating ♪
With its strange computer origins,
Beyond the Fence centers around
the Greenham Common anti-nuclear
Women's Peace Camp in the early 1980s.
It's a computer generated quest in which soldier Jim
must learn to understand a child, George.
Leading to an unlikely alliance with protester Mary.
♪ And I'm so scared of that sound ♪
♪ Scared of that sound ♪
The music is revealing some difficulties.
Just read the music.
Just stick to the.
What's interesting, there's lots
of familiar elements there,
but there's just weird things
happening with rhythm and timing.
♪ And I'm so scared of that ♪
♪ Scared of that sound ♪
♪ Just a bunch of tie-dye terrorists ♪
The lyrics are presenting their own challenges,
and every line is scrutinized.
♪ It is my job ♪
♪ It is my duty ♪
Of the 74 lines of this song,
14 were written by the Experiment's
computer lyricist, nicknamed Clarissa.
♪ It's a brand new kind of salvation ♪
♪ For their broken nation ♪
Great, lovely.
We don't have, it's a brand new
kind of salvation, we have just,
it's a brand new salvation. Oh yeah, sorry.
A brand new salvation comes from the computer.
So did the computer give us,
it's a brand new kind of salvation, or--
Actually no, it just gives--
It gave us a brand new salvation,
but we needed extra syllables to make the line work.
Two extra words were added
to fit the computer's lyric to the rhythm of the music.
So if we did the purist computer version,
it's a brand new salvation, without
the extra syllables, how does that scan?
It would be,
♪ It's a brand new salvation ♪
I can't allow that.
I'm such a purist about Wester's land, I can't.
It's a brand new salvation. It has to be
a brand new one, yeah.
It's a brand new salvation.
♪ It's a brand new salvation ♪
What would you feel about that?
I feel less upset about that.
♪ It's a brand new salvation ♪
I like that. -: Yeah?
I think Clarissa would be happy with that.
Yeah, I think she'd be happy with that.
♪ They know that this deterrent keeps us free ♪
♪ It's a brand new salvation ♪
♪ For their broken nation ♪
♪ You've gotta get those bums on seats ♪
♪ That's what it's all about ♪
The Experiment now demands
a rigorous test of the rehearsed material,
which means finding an audience.
♪ An empty theater means mountainous debts ♪
We've been granted access
to the database of Delfont Mackintosh Theatres,
who own eight of the big West End stages.
Using an algorithm, of course,
we've identified their most ardent musical fans.
Our very discerning guinea pigs
have no idea what they're about to see.
♪ Every bum is a bum you could kiss ♪
♪ Get 'em in, sit 'em down ♪
♪ You just gotta get those bums on seats ♪
Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,
and thank you for coming along this evening.
This is the first time that this material
has ever been performed live to a real live audience.
The computer's recipe, idea,
music, and lyrics will be put to the test.
♪ Every time we stop a vehicle ♪
♪ From entering that base ♪
The showing begins in the peace camp,
with a number to induce high energy, but low tension.
Bonds between characters are strengthened.
Your mother is not in love with me.
Come on.
But I would like us to be friends.
Do you think that's possible?
As tenderness should peak mid-act,
our soldier and female lead come
a step closer to finding true love.
♪ And I'm so scared of that ♪
♪ Scared of that sound ♪
♪ Nothing can stop us now ♪
And finally, we reach At Our Feet,
the high-energy act one closer.
♪ The future lies on ♪
♪ At our feet ♪
(audience applauds)
Thank you very much.
So, is there anyone who sort of has
anything that they wanted to share?
The harmonies we really loved,
'cause they worked so well together.
For me, the characters come alive
and they grew a lot for me through the songs,
which is something I like in a musical.
If you were to imagine the people who wrote this,
do you have a sort of picture of them in your mind at all?
I felt I recognized some of the melodies
and some of the tunes.
It felt really new and fresh
and the music didn't sound like anything I'd heard.
So, I'm afraid we haven't been entirely honest with you.
And there is one other piece of information
which I would like to share with you.
What you have just witnessed is the first,
to our knowledge, in history,
the first computer generated musical.
So if I were sat in your position.
(audience laughing)
I think I would have quite a lot of questions.
I didn't know what to think.
I was so confused, I didn't know what he meant.
What even is that?
But I think it's so intriguing.
And it's created a whole new way of making a musical,
that has got infinite possibilities.
Wow.
It's just mind-blowing.
I'm so excited about coming to see it.
I definitely think it'll be big.
Definitely.
So far, so good.
But the Experiment is not done yet,
and with nine songs still to be written,
a new computer is soon to join the party.
(guitar music)
Dr. Francois Pachet is a jazz musician
and computer scientist.
Having heard about the Experiment,
he has offered us the chance to use
a revolutionary new system called
Flow Composer for the final push.
Flow Composer, it's an interactive system.
It's not a generation system where you would
just click a button and that's it.
Unlike Android, Flow Composer
is a specialist in creative conversation.
To demonstrate the potential of a partnership,
Francois goes to work on a song being written for the show.
Okay, so I suggest quite a brutal edit
and remove the first nine bars.
Go on.
Then the computer will suggest
a brand new stretch of music to fill the gap.
(pleasant music)
Suppose you don't like it.
This is the new version.
(pleasant music)
Here you have a wrong note, but you see here, we can--
Just make it as natural.
Okay, here is natural.
You want better.
(pleasant music)
I almost feel guilty when I'm doing
all of that stuff, though. Oh, yes?
This is interesting.
I feel good when I destroy things.
I worry that that's sort of breaking the rules
of the game when you go, oh I don't like that,
I'll just change that line.
I think it's precisely the rule of the game is to break.
It's a break and repair game.
You break, the user, system repairs.
And because the system is never tired,
you can do this infinitely.
Away from the rehearsal room,
Nathan tackles one of the few remaining songs to be written.
To collaborate with the new Flow Composer system,
you first must choose the style
in which you'd like to write.
Be it disco, pop, or in this case,
anti-nuclear protest song.
♪ Hand in hand the line extends ♪
♪ All around the nine mile fence ♪
♪ 30,000 women chant ♪
♪ Bring the message home ♪
Real songs sung at
the Greenham Common Peace Camp are analyzed,
and without sampling or copying,
the computer creates an entirely new song.
We Are Greenham is born.
Flow Composer generated a melody
that came entirely from the information given to it
by the women who sang those songs 30 years ago.
Genuinely think you can hear that in We Are Greenham.
(piano music) (humming)
Pause, pause, pause, pause.
♪ They can't take away our sorrow ♪
♪ They can't take away our song ♪
♪ If we let them win ♪
♪ We'll all stand in ♪
♪ Which side are you on ♪
Greenham Common in Berkshire,
a former US Air Force base, housing nuclear cruise missiles.
For 19 years, women came here in the thousands
to protest against nuclear weapons.
Many lived here, camping beyond the fence from the silos.
The songs that everybody knew were the protest songs.
We wouldn't suddenly sit around
singing the Beatles, you know. (laughs)
The songs are all about strength in numbers
and people power and love,
and so they're nice things to sing,
and I think helped to buoy people's spirits at times.
♪ We are Greenham ♪
♪ We are home ♪
♪ We are freedom ♪
♪ We are strong ♪
♪ We don't want their Armageddon ♪
♪ They will hear our song ♪
I mean, look where we are.
You couldn't get further away from tapping keyboards.
Out of everything the computer could've chosen for us,
we've ended up in the middle of a field,
surrounded by trees, it's really cold, and that's exciting.
But it's very far away from
what I thought we'd ever be given.
♪ We are strong ♪
♪ We don't want their Armageddon ♪
♪ They will hear our song ♪
(upbeat rock music)
It's just a week to go until opening night,
and Beyond the Fence moves into
the Arts Theatre in London's West End.
And after a year's research by leading scientists,
many months of collaboration between humans and computers,
and six weeks of intense rehearsals,
the stage is set for the Experiment's final test.
Of course there's a huge amount unknown with this,
and although it's a piece that we've all
been investing in over the last few weeks,
ultimately this is an experiment,
and we're doing this for that very specific purpose.
And who knows what the audience are gonna make of this.
The experiment to create
the world's first computer generated musical is complete.
It's challenged scientists and theater professionals
to question human creativity.
To face the blurring boundaries
between themselves and machines.
But now, it's the turn of the audience.
♪ Opening night, opening night ♪
♪ It's opening night ♪
It's gonna happen, and it's gonna happen
in a very short space of time,
and there's nothing anyone can do about it now.
♪ Will it flop or will it go ♪
It doesn't feel like your typical academic project,
which kind of fizzles out with
maybe three people reading a paper down the line.
Instead, you've got real bums on seats.
♪ They're on their way ♪
A computer is in the same position as anyone
who's producing or creating a musical.
But I think the difference is, they're not scared.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Beyond the Fence company,
this is your five minute call, your five minute call.
I'm hoping I'm gonna hate it.
It's a bit like a chess game against a human and a computer.
I really, really want the human to win.
This is the biggest thing that's happened
to contest creativity in terms of our reach, ever.
Seeing the two worlds kind of colliding,
as they have on this, is an extraordinary thing.
I hope I still have a job tomorrow after seeing it.
I don't think you can invent the impulse
that makes you create the work of art.
Unless a computer one day has
a heart and a soul, I doubt it can get there.
Is it gonna get my pulse pounding?
Is it gonna get me crying?
It is gonna raise a titter?
Ooh, just any old day.
Any old day.
♪ What a bum ♪
Seven different computer systems
have shaped every element of Beyond the Fence.
Our human talent must now give them a voice.
(dramatic rock music)
The opening fanfare is unadulterated Android.
Nick Collins and Francois Pachet's algorithms
have helped define every song.
♪ And again and again and again ♪
A huge opening number.
♪ Don't waste the war ♪
A conflict setting.
♪ Don't suffocate the world ♪
A female lead.
A soldier.
All are choices determined by the data.
But will they draw the audience in?
♪ Our green gate's happening ♪
♪ Happening ♪
(audience applauds)
As the computer generated story unfolds,
the wounded soldier begins to understand the child,
whom we learn has not spoken for seven years.
Hey there, George.
Happy Halloween.
I haven't seen you in a while, how you been?
Almost a quarter of the show's lyrics
have come from Clarissa, the computer lyricist.
Four poignant lines from her let Jim
pour out his heart to George.
♪ So swallow me in the shadows ♪
♪ My heart was locked away ♪
♪ I sang one day of the stars ♪
♪ And the stars were blown away ♪
♪ I am graceful ♪
♪ So wonderfully graceful ♪
The comedy required
before the interval arrives on roller skates.
♪ I am graceful ♪
♪ So graceful ♪
♪ So bloody else is grateful ♪
♪ To me skids ♪
(audience applauds)
But the real test of the Experiment
will be whether it actually delivers
intensity and emotion, heart and soul.
Bye, George.
Thank you.
George, what did you just say?
Thank you.
♪ Thank you ♪
♪ For all that you've done ♪
♪ For the gloves and the friendship ♪
♪ The laughter and the gum ♪
♪ Thank you ♪
♪ To everyone here ♪
♪ I love you with all of my heart ♪
♪ And the world is a perfect adventure ♪
♪ And I just can't wait to start ♪
(audience applauds)
And after that, it's straight on
to the finale and the imminent verdict.
♪ At our feet ♪
♪ Sitting at our feet ♪
♪ At our feet ♪
♪ Knowing our future lies ♪
♪ At our feet ♪
(audience applauds)
I was really surprised.
Lots of it works.
I had to hold in my laughter
when I recognized Clarissa speaking
in some times in some of the sadder sections.
You could definitely note some of the lines
which were just a tiny bit less human than most.
I cried, like at the really emotional parts.
It's just amazing.
There was a fantastic anthem, wasn't there?
At Our Feet?
It was absolutely wonderful. I love it.
Well I don't think it's gonna entirely
change the medium or shake things up wildly.
(laughing)
I think Elton John, Andrew Lloyd Webber,
and Stephen Sondheim can sleep easy tonight.
I thought it was a really great company of actors,
could really sing, and there was
the most wonderful little girl.
But it's got a way to go yet.
On the red carpet,
there had been understandable skepticism.
And now?
I'm completely in disagreement what I said before.
That song Thank You by this amazing little girl,
have as much heart and soul as any song
any one of us could have written.
I'm really, really glad we came,
and I'm really glad to have been part of the experience.
'Cause actually, it does make you think
about what you do as a writer, and that's important.
And what of the scientists
who've been at the heart of the Experiment?
To bring together a super team of individuals
and do something that's insane and crazy at the same time
is a wonderful result in and of itself.
We've managed to do something that can contribute,
even if it's just a very small bit.
And that's a nice feeling.
I think this is an extraordinary achievement.
This mixture of the maths and the computing
and the creativity and the art
and the huge human element, because it comes into this.
So, this is enormously innovative, very exciting,
and I think it's worked.
(gentle piano music)
I don't know whether I was ever skeptical.
I think I was frightened.
I had big issues with scientists,
and I'm frightened of science,
and I'm frightened of technology,
and I'm frightened of what that means for me.
I mean, the interesting thing about this journey
is that it, on all levels, it's made me address my fears.
When we started getting bogged down
with the challenges, I really thought
there was a chance we'd fail.
And I don't think we have.
♪ Experiment ♪
♪ Make it your motto day and night ♪
♪ Experiment ♪
♪ And it will lead you to the light ♪
♪ The apple on the top of the tree ♪
♪ Is never too high to achieve ♪
♪ So take an example from Eve ♪
♪ Experiment ♪
♪ Be curious ♪
♪ Thought interfering friends may frown ♪
♪ Get furious ♪
♪ At each attempt to hold you down ♪
♪ If this advice you only imply ♪
♪ The future can offer you infinite joy and merriment ♪
♪ Experiment ♪