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Polymath pianist and former child prodigy Kit Armstrong on being more than a performer – he’s teaching music appreciation to artificial intelligence

  • Kit Armstrong was composing music at 5, a science undergraduate at 10, a soloist with top orchestras as a teen and did a master’s in pure maths ‘to unwind’
  • Ahead of his piano recital in Hong Kong, he talks about his latest project – teaching music appreciation to AI to prepare it for composing its own tunes

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Los Angeles-born former child prodigy Kit Armstrong photographed with his grand piano in the church in northern France that has been his home since 2012. He performs in Hong Kong on December 11. Photo: Courtesy of Kit Armstrong
Enid Tsui

In the accelerated universe that is Kit Armstrong’s life, the 30-year-old former child prodigy who studied at several universities and institutions in the United States and Europe before the age of 12 has hit a stage others might see as a midlife crisis.

“I have experienced lots of wonderful things as a full-time musician since graduating from my science studies in 2012. I will still tour a lot [as a concert pianist], but to be only a performer, selling the same product again and again, it has become less important for me than an overarching idea of what I can do for classical music.”

Ahead of his December 11 piano recital in Hong Kong, the Los Angeles-born Armstrong, who has shared his extraordinary story in numerous press interviews since he was a child, is in Taiwan, his mother’s birthplace, training artificial intelligence to interpret music.

He is working with a team of computer scientists at Taipei’s National Tsing Hua University. Just as humans often begin their appreciation of music through nursery rhymes, the AI prototype is starting its education with “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”.

Musician and scientist Kit Armstrong at home in a deconsecrated church in Hirson, northern France. He is working with scientists to teach “what I have seen and learned and what I’m capable of in the field of music” to a computer. Photo: courtesy of Kit Armstrong
Musician and scientist Kit Armstrong at home in a deconsecrated church in Hirson, northern France. He is working with scientists to teach “what I have seen and learned and what I’m capable of in the field of music” to a computer. Photo: courtesy of Kit Armstrong

Many people around the world are teaching computers to compose, to paint and create art in human ways, but most are shallow and inferior to the work of human artists, Armstrong. “With AI, I am focusing on interpretation, not composition. Interpretation means not following rules.

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