AWS’ weird AI-powered keyboard experiment, DeepComposer, is no more.
In a blog post today, the company announced it’s shutting down the five-year-old DeepComposer, a physical MIDI piano and AWS service that let users compose songs with the help of generative AI.
“After careful consideration, we have made the decision to end support for AWS DeepComposer,” Kanchan Jagannathan, AWS AI devices program manager, wrote. “If you have data stored on the AWS DeepComposer console, you will be able to use AWS DeepComposer as normal until September 17, 2025, when support for the service will end.”
DeepComposer, launched in 2019 at AWS’ annual re:Invent conference, was a 32-key, two-octave MIDI keyboard and collection of tools for AI-powered music generation. AWS rather bombastically called it “the world’s first machine learning-enabled musical keyboard for developers.”
Using the AWS DeepComposer service, users could record a melody with the physical keyboard or on-screen keys, select a genre-specific music-generating model, and have DeepComposer create a full-length song. The finished track could be played in the AWS console or exported and shared to SoundCloud.
DeepComposer was initially a dev-only product, but launched to all AWS customers in 2020, with the MIDI keyboard priced at $99.
Opinions were mixed on DeepComposer’s ease of use — and musicality. Many reviewers of the MIDI keyboard complained that they couldn’t get the keys working properly, and that the AI instrumentation left much to be desired.
My colleague Frederic Lardinois was similarly underwhelmed when he took DeepComposer for a spin in 2019. But, as he noted in his piece, DeepComposer was always meant to be more of a learning tool than a tool for writing the next Top 40 song — along the lines of other AWS AI devices like the DeepLens camera and DeepRacer AI car, both of which AWS also shut down in recent years (though DeepRacer lives on virtually).