Sorry for ruining your holiday playlist: A computer generated Christmas carol

Move over, Mariah Carey. There's a new Christmas tune in Tinseltown and it's stolen our hearts.


The song doesn't have a name, officially. Nor does the artist. It was written, composed and performed by artificial intelligence.

"The idea is that the system listens to music and from that learns to create music," Raquel Urtasun tells As It Happens host Carol Off. "It learned to generate text that sounds human-like."

Urtasun is one of the computer scientists who brought this sweet, sweet music to our ears. She is the Canada research chair in Machine Learning and Computer Vision, and an associate professor at University of Toronto.

Urtasun says the jolly system has read over 11,000 books. She fed it images of Christmas scenes, lyrics and about 100 hours of music. 

"From that it extrapolates and generates more complicated sentences," Urtasun explains. "It generated the sentences — that doesn't mean we have sentiment — that's a different story! There's no such thing as consciousness in the system."

Urtasun hopes the song will get people into the Christmas spirit but admits the lyrics need some work before Michael Bublé adds it to his holiday repertoire.

"Sorry — what can you do? It's a first prototype!"

For more on this story, listen to our full interview with Raquel Urtasun.