About the theme music

The theme music of this podcast explores machines’ capabilities to generate music. The theme’s creator, Korneel van den Broek, is a developer who lives in Brussels. He used a variant of the open-source AI model MP3net, which debuted as Battery-Operated at the 2021 AI Song Contest and was featured in the NYTimes. The model is trained using millions of song samples. MP3net then learns to mimic (or can we say understand?) different aspects of the music, going from timbre, pitch, harmony, and rhythm to song structure.

The resulting music has the retro sound of an old gramophone, and is also somewhat reminiscent of Amnesiac–era Radiohead (at least according to the podcast host). The melody, in F#-minor, lands somewhere between a piano and a wind instrument.