0.0 - Let's get things started

A new project and I'm having my hopes up of finishing it. This project is part of the BSc Artificial Intelligence at the University of Amsterdam and this labbook is part of the preliminary assignments for the thesis.

After years of singing in a choir my personal dream is to make music with the computer at a level that is comparable to that of a trained musician. Therefore some experiments will be run to see what a convolutional neural network (CNN) is capable of and to what extend its performance can be enhanced with tweaks and hooks to make the algorithm perform better.

After taking a short course from a TensorFlow expert I decided to use this framework, or Python package with cuDNN libraries for CUDA and GPU support enabled. The training therefore can be done on a regular gaming laptop instead of in a cluster, although it might be fruitful to look into cloud computing solutions for training purposes as well, the current budget (€0) doesn't enable any server side capabilities.

This are some of the first technical details of the setup for this project, as I'm not currently fully aware of what the coming weeks will bring I'm curious to see where this adventure will take me.

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