The Grio design team has grown in both size and expertise over the past few years, and as our Design Manager, I spend a fair amount of time thinking about how we can improve our tools and processes to continue supporting that growth. One step I’ve taken has been to formally integrate a design thinking approach into all of our projects. In this post, I’ll provide a brief introduction to design thinking, explain how it works in practice, and dig into the critical role of empathy in good design.  

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In Part 1 of this series, we dug into the technical side of AI music composition, including neural network and algorithmic methods. Now, I’d like to step back and focus on a different set of questions:

• Can AI-composed music be good, i.e., will BeyoncAI ever rival the real Beyoncé?
• How might AI change the music industry?
• Who owns the rights to AI-composed music?

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Humans have been making music for as long as we can remember — but the tools and methods we use to do so have evolved significantly, from simple wooden drums, to wind and string instruments, to electronic synthesizers. And now, with projects like Google’s Magenta and Sony’s FlowMachines, we’re beginning to see the emergence of music that’s not just played by computers, but actually composed by artificial intelligence.

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Introduction to Part 1

This post is the first in a four-part series on creating Android custom views, and covers a few introductory topics, including: how to decide if a custom view is the best solution to your problem, the three basic methods for creating a custom view, and the required constructors you’ll need to implement when subclassing the View class.

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