The World’s First Computer Generated Musical Is About To Open In London

What if the age of machines isn’t run by psychotic skeletal killing robots but computerized theater directors instead? That future may be upon us: the world is about to witness the world’s first AI penned musical.

According to the Guardian,Beyond the Fence, a musical which opens in London’s West End in February, is the result of an investigation that initially began with Cambridge University’s Machine Learning Group to determine what makes a musical successful, measuring factors such as song, story, costume, and characters to come up with a recipe for a “good” musical.

Using their research, the team collaborated with AI institutions at universities across Europe: London University’s What If Machine invented the setting and characters and this specific theme: What if a wounded soldier had to learn how to understand a child in order to find true love?The team took that line and its attributions and fed them to a story telling computer, Madrid University’s PropperWryter, who popped out a love story set during the dusk of the Cold War between a British single mother who protests the arrival of a US missile outpost and a the American airman assigned to it. Hint: it’s the child who brings them together.

Music was scored by a system called the Andrew Lloyd Webber. Lyrics were written by a program called Cloud Lyricist that proffered some pretty stream-of-conscious sounding lines:

“the last end of a place that disappeared with all the words that could see to anyone / never let me in an underwear song when they remember.”

Needless to say some human editing has been necessary.