Spring is a wonderful season to celebrate rebirth and new life. The long, cold winter is over. The weather is warmer and sunnier. The trees again have leaves and the flowers are blooming. The season represents hope, joy and beauty. At this time, many people think of this classical music piece — Spring, which shows happiness. Italian composer Antonio Vivaldi wrote it in the seventeen hundred.

However, not all songs about spring are happy. This song written and sung by K.D. Lang is about dreaming of spring in cold dark places. She recorded I Dream of Spring in 2008.

Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein wrote It Might as Well Be Spring for the movie State Fair in 1945. Frank Sinatra sings it. It is a feeling of restlessness or excitement brought on by the coming of spring. Richard Rodgers also wrote Spring Is Here, this time with Lorenz Hart. Ella Fitzgerald sings this song about feeling lonely during this season.

Frank Loesser wrote the sad song, Spring Will be a Little Late This Year. Why has the season been delayed? Because the singer’s lover has left her. Sarah Vaughn released(发行) her version of the song in 1953.

By now you may be thinking, “Enough with the sad songs, already!” Ok, then how about a cowboy song? Gene Autry was one of America’s most famous singing cowboys. He recorded When It’s Springtime in the Rockies in 1937.

And finally, we’ll leave you with a sunny song called Up Jumped Spring. Freddie Hubbard wrote this jazz song in 1977 and Billy Taylor Trio performs it.

You might think that the latest pop hit is created by a machine rather than a human being. Actually, getting artificial intelligence to understand many aspects of music is easier said than done. Describing things like musical structure, harmony, and form can be difficult enough when speaking with somebody who did not study music theory, let alone a machine.

A new study out of China examines if AI can be taught to recognize some of these features and then to compose music itself. To do this, they used an AI enhanced with a program called the Harmony-Aware Hierarchical Music Transformer (HAT), a system that can turn musical data into machine-readable parts and then review those parts for harmony, form, and other musical qualities. The system was then fed hundreds of pieces of human-composed piano music to learn what pop music is supposed to sound like.

To see how well it could perform, the researchers asked the AI to complete a song. They fed the AI the opening to Guang Yin De Gu Shi, a real Chinese pop song, and then measured how closely it was able to match the song in terms of generating melodic segments (旋律片段) of similar length. For good measure, they also gave the same task to two other music-generating AIs which were less advanced than HAT. While HAT outperformed its computer rivals (对手), the segments it created were disconnected from each other and clearly not human-made, though they were roughly the same length as those in the human-made tune.

When Capt. Greg Galeazzi joined the Army seven years ago, he was well aware of the risks of injuries or even death he would face. In 2011, the risks became Galeazzi’s reality — he got terribly injured in an explosion where he lost his double legs. “I was a shell of a man,” he said. “Who I was, was gone.”

Before his injury, playing the guitar had been a special pastime for Galeazzi. Music had always been important to him. He felt deep sadness because he thought he’d lost his ability to play music.

However, everything changed when Galeazzi joined MusiCorps, a music rehabilitation (康复) program for severely wounded soldiers who are recovering at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. “We match the injured troops with professional musicians,” said Arthur Bloom, who founded the program in 2007. “They help wounded soldiers play music and recover their lives.”

Bloom, a graduate of the Yale School of Music, offers his services to patients at Walter Reed who have an interest in playing an instrument. Program participants practice technique, write and record music. Or they may just get together for a jam session (即兴演奏会).

The journey to recovery for many soldiers is a long one. It can require dozens of operations and many years spent in hospitals. There’s so much downtime at Walter Reed, and that's what they fill up with music.

Since 2007, Bloom and his group have helped hundreds of wounded soldiers. For Galeazzi, joining MusiCorps has helped restore his confidence and made him more optimistic about his future. “Something survived that horrible injury in Afghanistan,” Galeazzi said. “Arthur and his program changed my outlook on what is possible.”

“I’ve seen guys going through such a hard time with their injuries that they are very withdrawn,” Bloom said. “The music becomes their new way of communicating. It can be just as powerful as the spoken word. By injecting music into this space, we can inject life.”