London Lock-in Tune No 24 – A tune composed by a machine! – The Humours of Ravelin

It's Day 24 of recording, which means it's now 38 days since we sent everyone home from work.

I work at a company called Ravelin, which I cofounded with some friends 5 years ago. We use a technique called machine learning to solve fraud. (Check us out here! www.ravelin.com)

There isn't much crossover between my work and my music, or so it would seem. But machine learning is quite a broad discipline and there is a community of musical enthusiasts applying some of the techniques of machine learning to music. We are teaching computers to sing!

When you think about Irish music, and indeed other folk musics, they are well suited to machine learning. There is a large corpus of work, freely available, with no copyright, and large tolerance for broad interpretation. The best example of this is a site developed by Jeremy Keith (
Moreover, thanks to pioneering work done by Chris Walshaw and others at much of the music was transcribed to a form of notation readable by computers without any need for extra work.

All the prerequisites were in place. Researchers at Queen Mary, University of London developed and which is where I generated and modified the tune I play today.

So this is a tune composed by a computer, with light editing and arrangement by me to make it more playable and idiomatic. It is definitely an idiosyncratic tune – certainly not the easiest to play, with an unusual number of bars in the first half. But as an experiment, and an experience – brilliant.

Would you be able to tell it was composed by a computer? Either way, I hope you like it.

ravelin,irish,fiddle,machine learning,composition,ml,fraud,detection,