Beyond the Fence is a commercial project, undertaken for a television documentary, that has produced a musical show billed as “the world’s first computer-generated musical”. Several computational creativity systems have been used in the production of various parts of this musical, which has been performed in London’s West End for a two week run in 2016. Having been involved in this project as an informed commentator who was not involved in creating any of the software, I consider two questions that together form the main contribution of this paper: (1) To what extent is the project successful? and (2) To what extent does this project demonstrate computational creativity? Investigations into these questions show that Beyond the Fence has successfully shown how existing creative software can indeed be used to create a plausible and acceptable musical. The resulting musical has been moderately well-received by most critics, though standards are raised high for computational creativity in the public eye. The project has also raised the profile of computational creativity research. Some some useful lessons have also been highlighted for computational creativity; in particular, computational creativity should include more than merely replicating norms, and completing independent tasks within the creative process (with little feedback or collaboration between tasks). The impact for computational creativity is that for these larger scale multi-system public-facing projects to be more successful, we are reminded of the need to develop as well as replicate human creative achievements, and to allow our systems to be able to communicate and refine work as well as offer inspirational material.
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