Slashdot Mirror
Triumph of the Cyborg Composer
An anonymous reader writes "UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor David Cope's software, nicknamed Emmy, creates beautiful original music. So why are people so angry about that? From the article: 'Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?'"
Deal with it.
Good tunes are good tunes. What's their problem?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Purity
8 minutes. That didn't take long
If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?
Mozart's greatest contribution to music wasn't neccessarily his symphonies. It was the algorithms he constructed, finding that pleasing music has mathematical undertones. I'm sure he would be emphatically proud of the machine, and would have, no doubt, used it in order to broaden his ability to compose. Imagine, using these machines to compose sibling symphonies, when played alone, sound pleasing, but when played together combine to form an entirely new harmony. Something that would take a human hundreds of years of trial and error, or some brutal headscratching to correctly compose... instead tweaked, played back, and suggested by an appliance.
These robots do no more harm to him and his legacy than Adobe Photoshop does to Pablo Picasso.
I am the richest astronaut ever to win the superbowl.
A machine could never produce Darkthrone's "Transilvanian Hunger." Sometimes there's more to music than the notes which compose it.
People are always threatened when they feel they can be replaced by automation. Do I get bonus points for quoting Trek?
The article asks if great composers in the last millenia were nothing more than mathematical manipulators. Does it really matter at this point? We are still fans of it hundreds of years later, and for the purists out there, it wouldn't matter if Mozart wrote them on the shitter, it's still unbelievably complex original music created with nothing more than the human mind, and it still challenges composers to this day.
If you want to look for mathematical manipulators, perhaps you should look no further than the "producers" behind the utter crap that's top o' the pop charts today. It sure as hell takes more than natural talent to make that shit sound good. The computer programmers that wrote the voice enhancing algorithms are brilliant.
google's cache
I suppose next we'll be saying Einstein was just some idiot who used his understanding of mathematics to point out the "obvious" theory of relativity, spacetime, and all of that. What the hell is up with this anti-science bent society has come up with lately? It's almost as if the application of mathematics to everyday life is now to be viewed with skepticism, rather than praised for allowing us a deeper understanding of our world.
So what if music can be described mathematically? So musicians are also gifted with an intuitive understanding of mathematics that we can't fully understand yet. Wouldn't it be prudent to explore this connection? Why could Mozart and other artists grasp these fundamentals over four hundred years before our contemporaries found a natural connection between their talent and a mathematical understanding? What does this mean for the human mind? For us? Does this shed some light on an aspect of the human condition that was previously unilluminated?
You know what? I don't care whether music is created by a person or a machine -- if it enriches my life, that is what matters.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
There's nothing "mere" about the mathematics of music or the fractal beauty of the shape of landscapes or the sound of the great outdoors. Humans are wired to appreciate all that, and it's the patterns at their core that both make them appealing and tractable to generate artificially.
A computer program that can generate music doesn't scare me.
A program that can enjoy music ...
A student in a grade 12 programming class can write a program to create English sentences that at least sound ~ right. So in my honest opinion their is no reason someone could not create a program to create music.
Now getting a program that will write music that is as good as the greats is a huge accomplishment, don't get me wrong, but their is little reason to believe it is impossible.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I wish the article had better examples (like the pieces that people couldn't tell whether Bach or the program wrote them) because the pieces that are excerpted in the article are not convincing to me as being anything good human composers need to worry about being replaced by.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
So if Mozart et all turn out to be brilliant, intuitive mathematicians, where's the shame? I TA a math class at a university, and during a test a week or so ago, I was struck by the insanity of the power of the TI's EVERYONE had on their desks. (Yeah, they get to use TI's.) When the far out becomes a given, we go further.
Check out the "drum machine" this guy built using real African drums and a couple of Wii controllers -- he explains how it works here. The interesting thing is he's similarly letting the computers do the actual improvising through algorithms that he developed.
if Beethoven, Mozart and others were just skilled at mathematical note manipulation? Who cares? Just because a guy with a computer can now do the something does not in the least bit diminish the accomplishments of Beethoven and friends. It shows they did not need a stinking computer to do it; they did it in their brains. I would not attribute the same amount of brain power to Professor Cope. Anyone troubled by this has even less brain power than most.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
The real test is whether it can be used to drive the loitering kids away from convenience stores and McDonald's.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
Most of what is special about Mozart music is not in the music, is in us. It have meaning, we gave meaning to it, even if is just music, if a machine would generate something similar, and we know that is a machine and not a prodigy child, we maybe would just see it as a collection of sounds, maybe that kind of music would have never been popular if noone special had put it into our common culture.
The real debate here is if our molecules are somehow fundamentally better then their transistors, limiting computers from achieving the same things we humans achieve.
So the people who think that it is impossible are just speciesists.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Nothing really new here. There will always be human musicians and music writers. People are still learning to play chess even though chess computers can beat almost every chess player in the world, even grandmasters. This music machine was made possible only because humans showed the way. After all, it was programmed by a human.
Rebel Science News
I've actually listened to some of Professor Cope's synthetic music.
Each piece replicates pretty well the style and feel of a particular author or genre of music. Probably not all possible genres and authors, but certainly the ones I've listened to.
What happens when we have the ability to generate as much music of a particular style as we want? Mozart had a particular style - how many hours of listening to Mozart-ish music do you need before it becomes commonplace and boring?
One of the nice things about $FamousComposer is that his works *are* famous... and finite. I don't think I want to burn out my appreciation for someone by listening to his style for hours on end.
So I'm wondering if this will become a problem for kids of the future. Loading up their ipods with hours and hours of a particular style, then getting bored with it. I like having an appreciation for particular authors.
Music follows a set of rules.
As does law, but law also follows the golden rule of plutocracy: he who has the gold makes the rules.
There absolutely isn't any reason why a computer program can't take a modern tune and play it following the same tonal styles as Mozart.
There is one: copyright.
It may be able to create pretty sounding melodies because of the rules involved with music writing. If you take a music theory class, you get told certain rules that must be followed: how cords can progress, intervals to avoid etc. If you just translate those rules to computer code, then anything it makes will sound good. What it cannot create is real creativity. There are some composers such as Wagner, Mahler and Stravinsky who chose to break those rules. Their music doesn't sound pretty, but it is very enjoyable and it obeys enough of those rules to sound good. In short, we'll never see a computer compose something like the rite of spring.
It's one thing to be impressed with a computer-generated composition, but we shouldn't forget that the computer probably composes a thousand awful pieces before it hits on something that's worth playing for someone. There still needs to be a human there to sort through all the trash, and I really doubt that this sorting job will be turned over to software in my lifetime.
I consider myself a reasonable person capable of enjoying good music.
Now, I cannot find anything special about this robot music. Then again, not all composers are equally moving to me , either. To think about it, not even all music from the same composer are the same for me.
Can this software make something to denote a certain emotion? Can it get a feeling of joy and compose something joyful?
hmm?
Just because a computer can be trained to synthesize music based on some basic rules of good composition and the examples set by others somehow reduces human accomplishment to meaningless? To put it another way: the smartest computer processor in the world is still arguably an idiot savant compared to your average human brain. It does what it does well because it is single-mindedly focused on the task at hand, and it can quite literally do absolutely nothing else but what it's told to do. Even if you tell it to do something else, it has to be ordered first. My hamster has more self-will! That being said, since only a very few humans can compose incredible music, I think it's safe to say that it's still the accomplishment of genius and nothing to disparage. We should all be so lucky to be so talented. In the end, I think the value placed on the talents of a human composer is that it's a naturally occurring phenomenon, and therefore something to be treasured. We can genetically engineer a plant to grow a perfect rose anytime, but it will never beat the value of the wild strain that actually comes up with a perfect rose on its own.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."
Anyone else listen to the two samples? They sound horrible. I put on some Mozart afterwards, and Wolfgang put the robotunes to shame.
Music IS math. This is because at a more fundamental level acoustics are math. Things like octaves weren't chosen arbitrarily. While the math may have not been understood back when it was developed, it wasn't arbitrary. An octave is an octave because the frequency is double. If you look at a graph of sin (x) + sin (2x) you see how frequency doubling fits nicely together. So you discover that the fundamentals of music are all based in math. It was worked out by listening, and trying, but the reason it works can be explained mathematically. At this point, we have a pretty damn good understanding of the math underlying it (it isn't all that complex compared to many other things).
Thus, it should be no surprise that we can make a computer that can make music. As you say, this is no way reduces the beauty of music, or the accomplishments of musicians.
Hell look at fractals. Look at the amazing beauty, the amazing complexity that can come from Z = Z^2 + C. That is the fundamental equation of the Mandelbrot set. All that you see in it is simply derived for iterations of that equation around the complex plane.
What if a machine could write emotionally evocative music or create the most stunning paintings? What if there were a machine that could weave an intricate story full of clever, intuitive dialogue? What if -- dare I imagine -- a machine could someday produce the absolutely funniest slashdot comments?
Here's what I think will happen. Finally, people will start seeing the amazing *software* to be the new, beautiful work of artistic creation that it is. Such software, like conventional artistic outlets, takes great reflection and insight to discover those processes and principles that seem to reveal a glimpse into the very intangible things which makes us human.
The machine extrapolates based upon certain rules or constraints the programmer has programmed the machine to abide by. The machine knows that note X is pleasing to the ear after note Y, or note Z will cause a cacophony. But keep in mind the machine only knows this because we allow it to. And while the machine may compose music abiding by whatever constraints we give to it, it will never be able to develop or experiment with music. The machine can create Mozart-like pieces because the fundamental ways in which Mozart changed music are well-documented and have influenced popular music ever since, thus factoring into however we program the machine. Even so, the machine won't be able to tread where humans haven't, since it only knows the rules we give it. Music will always be furthered by us based on social, cultural, or regional influences.
Anyone else feel me on this one? Or am I misguided?
These don't exactly sound like Mozart sonatas; and if you really want to try to match the pinnacle of solo piano music, you'd have to reach for Beethoven's sonatas.
I think the idea is really cool, and I'm looking forward to it getting better and better. But from those two samples I heard, "Emily" is nowhere near Beethoven, let alone Mozart.
That’s the only thing special about us.
If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?
Nothing was. Sorry.
Of course, as a human, he was an exception. But it is long proven, that there is no such thing as a prodigy genius. The only differences: 1. Keeping oneself exactly on the balancing point between too hard and too easy tasks. Which creates maximum motivation. And 2. storing things efficiently. Like “base configuration X” plus “mod Y” plus “property Z changed” = 3 memory slots. Not the perhaps thousands of a complete set of properties. And that”s all. I’m using that myself. (Harder than it sounds, but definitely doable for everyone.)
We humans started out thinking that we were the God-chosen species... or even race. The only one with intelligence. The only one with a “soul” (an imaginary concept anyway). On a planet at the center of the universe.
And gradually, all those things fell apart.
We’re not special. We’r also only machines.
It’s just that for some weird reason, we have concepts like “good”, “bad” and “special”, and some of us hang their whole stupid pride on being “good” and “special”.
Things are just what they are. You make the best out of it.
I say, I’m pretty damn proud that we humans have come to the level, where we nearly create our own forms life. And if that life is successful, then so are we. Just like a master is proud of his student, when the student defeats him for the first time.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
computer:music :: science:god
This is essentially the same concept and execution as Virtual Bach, which was (as far as I can tell) an earlier version of Emmy that David Cope made in the 1980s. What's changed, exactly? As far as I can recall, Virtual Bach took a composer of your choice, was given a sample of his music, and then created a "new" piece based on patterns that it recognized. I don't know the particulars, but perhaps Emmy can write in an original style now.
Yet Another Tech Blog
(but so much more, including game and movie reviews)
http://yanteb.peasantoid.org
Heard the music and it sucked!
These days having as much ability as a computer can be a very special compliment. We should all strive to be as able as our machines in many areas.
I took quite a few classes on counterpoint, and was able to write fugues that sounded very much like Bach... and it didn't take too much skill. Other composers had a similar experience.
The reason why, I suspect, is that it's easier to analyze an existing body of work and imitate that, than it is to create entirely new, original music. The same goes for art, literature, etc.
I guess it's easier to drive down a road after someone else has paved it.
If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?
What was special about Mozart was that he could write music so good that it has taken nearly ten thousand years of human civilization and, in the past century, an unprecedented, billion-dollar industry backed by a huge number of brilliant scientists and engineers to begin to devise machines that write music good enough for someone to even ask the question.
If people are going to get upset every time one of our creations outdoes us, they had better plan on being upset a lot. Eventually, someone will write software that bitches about its unique place in nature better than we do, too.
As for art -- art is a mental stance on the part of the observer. It's how you look at (or listen to) something that makes it art. It doesn't matter whether that something was made by a human being, a lower animal, an extraterrestrial alien, or a machine, or even if it was the product of purely natural processes. There is nothing intrinsically artistic about any object. Art is a set of human mental processes.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Wake me when computers write original, meaningful and compelling lyrics to their music.
I am shocked, SHOCKED to discover that one machine can do what another does.
Music doesn't come from the "soul" because THERE. IS. NO. SUCH. THING. You aren't driven by magical faeries or a mystical man in the sky.
We are all just biological machines.
How many pieces did he have to generate to get the two sample tracks in TFA (not that the sample tracks were particularly stunning -- the first was pleasant at least, though)? If you spend just as much time setting parameters and listening through duds as it does to write your own of comparable quality...then what's the point? Obviously a grand number of monkeys on typewriters would eventually come up with Shakespeare -- same principle here. I'm not trying to knock his/his program's accomplishment, I just want to know. I think there is a real future though for AI in all domains, including music.
And a lot of composers are trying to express their own particular idea, and I'm not sure how much automatic generation of the notes is going to help them (obviously some are satisfied pulling from such a source). And there are lot of listeners engage with a composer's work not just on the level of individual pieces, but they study works' relations to each other and to the life and times of the composer as well.
Is that WE can design and build THEM. When they can do the same for self-aware protoplasmic humanoids, it might be time to become upset about silly "supremacy" issues, and not a moment before then. Till then, sit back and enjoy the music...
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
You aren't driven by magical faeries
Speak for yourself.
Can his computer father 8 children, go blind, hack up bits of lung, die of syphilis, etc.? Come'on, *that's* what it *really* means to be *human*! Any farkin machine can do what I do on guitar, but is it also an artist, coder, it monkey, father of two (geniuses, yes I know), travlin' mugrotharaunchero, writer, phoet, gardenier, sleepin-at-the-wheel neopagan, breadmakin', puppet tossing, dwarfballin' cthulhubogomilitant rumsmugglin' cyberpunk? Geeze! Give me a break an' another cup of shut the fuck up. will'ya?
> If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?
Uh, what? They invented their styles, and it's taken us a few hundred years to convincingly reverse engineer them. Remember the old saying about imitation being the highest form of flattery.
The new program in TFA is essentially the same idea. Since its sense of style is seeded by lots of human input, it's not what you might think of when you hear it's called computer generated compositions. It's really computer-assisted composition. In the new one the rules come from the programmer, and in the old ones the rules came from famous composers.
If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?
What was so special about Mozart? Are you effing kidding me? How about that he wrote great music?
You take some great composer who creates a seminal style, writes some really great music, and then a program comes along and makes a descent song in that style. It still sounds like we need Mozarts, Bachs, Beethovens, and Ellingtons and Parkers to come up with that great genre for the programs to work in.
Wake me when a program writes a really great genre all by itself. You want to know what I'll say then? "Wow, human beings and programs can write some really nice music."
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Only that we are building systems that are designed to build bio systems to do what we can do and what we cannot do. It is in it's infancy but is progressing rapidly.
Your frankly idiotic level of social grace and pedantic inability to graciously build on his initially imperfect argument hints at a deeper truth...that slashdotters are often pricks.
Implicit in your spiritual view of being beaten by our creations is still some arrogance and a false sense of a special place in the Universe. If your greatest dream is to see humans be replaced by a better form of intelligence, then I am sorry, we don't share the same dream. I agree we are not special in this universe...and our creations are not special...therefore, I don't think it's worth the sacrifice of my modest ability to enjoy a modest existence in order to realize the creation of some super AI that is still a meaningless construct in a meaningless universe. I'm biased toward seeing my actual biological children and grandchildren be born and grow up than to create some AI to supplant them and steal their futures.
Brilliant! Now the circle will only be complete if another professor can invent the cyborg listener which offers a sensitive digital-ear and a critical appreciation of cyborg music. Then we're free to pursue how the two get along. regards niyam
To be honest, I think it makes people a bit uncomfortable because really, when you think about it, what are we besides really fancy organic "computers"? I think that news such as this raises interesting philosophical questions not just about what makes Mozart unique, but what makes us all unique. How long before someone can just whip out a KingSkippus capable of doing everything I do, thinking everything I think, posting what I post on Slashdot, and for all practical purposes, replacing anything special I might have to offer the world to make it a better place?
Also, this could make religious people mighty uncomfortable. After all, God is the one who is supposed to be the One through whom such grandiose works are created. How long before someone can just whip out everything that only He could supposedly inspire?
I'm not saying that I feel this way; I think the whole prospect is very cool, and the more that religious people can feel uncomfortable, the better. ;)
Since I learned about harmony, chords and progressions, I knew that there would be a way where music could be parametrized and be written by a computer without need for a composer. Just fill in the rules, add some transitions here and there, and use these instruments. Ta-da!
Music is a mathematical concept (I learned that since watching Donald Duck in the Mathmagic land when I was 8). It's only natural that computers can do something that is by its nature, mathematical.
However, just because music can be written by a machine, doesn't make the machine superior. After all, musical genres are born and some new twists to old classics are done. This requires something called creativity - and that's a quality that machines cannot have. Certainly, I can listen to a beautiful sonata or (insert your favorite music kind here) with randomly-generated sequences. However, can a machine write a song about how I felt the time I watched a full moon over the sea while the sun was just rising?
Well maybe a machine could do that in the future... when androids are able to dream with electric sheep.
At the limit, we could stop copying or sharing any music recordings, as our "players" could simply be real-time composer and synthesizer devices that give us our own unique stream of music (unique among all listeners, and among all times for one listener). This leads me to several vaguely opposing observations:
Many people would object, because to them music is a social activity. The masses don't really want to sit and listen deeply to music in private. No matter how engaging it might be, what they really care about is whether others are listening to it as well.
Others might object because a common way of privately enjoying music is to listen to something familiar for its nostalgic value. Having a constant stream of novel music would diminish the chances of reminiscing.
On the other hand, even these dynamic systems would then open a new meta-art: revising and circulating the rulesets that drive these dynamic music machines. Those rules would be the new creative compositions, explored and communicated among people.
In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination.
Indeed. Particularly so with music based on any the twelve-tone scale: given any set of N notes or chords, the twelve-tone scale allows for a finite number of permutations. A very small subset of these permutations will seem "musical", at least in the way we tend to think of music.
There are of course infinite variables at play, such as timbre and loudness, but in the samples, these aspects were under the control of the human who performed Emmy's compositions. There are human performers who can make mundane noises and progressions seem musical; and there are humans who can make masterpieces of composition sound like anything but music.
In short, yes, there is soul behind music, even though it is based on certain mathematical rules that machines can easily understand, and even the inadvertent borrowing of phrases from other works.
Certainly a computer could likely generate the tune for the next hit pop song. Or perhaps generate a movie soundtrack (scary notes at the right time, sad notes, happy notes). Or come up with better versions of John Cage's 4'33".
But as of yet I doubt a computer could come up with music that is thematic, poetic, and emotionally expressive. One compilation of music that comes to mind right now is Respighi's Symphonic Poems. Each piece could be deconstructed mathematically, but I doubt a computer could come up with a theme (Rome, in this case) and paint us a musicological picture covering a whole gambit of emotions relating to this theme--from awe and grandeur (Pines of the Appian way) to melancholy and reflective, hopeful and joyful (Pines near a Catacomb, for example). Another great music-painting is Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Others find deep emotional meaning in various kinds of religious music.
For most musicians music is an emotional expression that happens to use a mathematical structure, or even borrowed motifs and sequences. As long as this is true, I don't think there's much to worry about. A computer might be able to simulate emotional music, but there'd be no underlying emotional message.
On the other hand if a computer generates a nice piece of music that could become associated by us with an emotional scene, it could "come alive" as it were. The line would further be blurred by the use of computers by artists to generate music for them. I don't see a problem in that.
Just maths ey? :P
Yeah, because maths is so easy. Being a great mathematician is no where near as awesome as being a great composer.
Human beings are great at pattern matching, it's what we do, it's all that we do. We aren't special.
The sooner we get used to that the less time and effort we'll waste fighting over stupid things.
- jessta
...and that is all I have to say about that.
http://jessta.id.au
I would be concerned if the computer had spontaneously expressed an interest in hearing Mozart.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
The album structure itself kind of evolved around vinyl. The length--about 35 min--is just long enough to fit on a record, and generally both the front and back sides have a "beginner" and an "ender". The front side will end with an appropriately strong but unresolving song and the first song of the 2nd side will be something of a 'kicker' to reward you for getting off your ass and flipping it over (think of "Money" from DSOTM). This is something of a pattern in album arrangement which is sometimes noticeable on modern vinyl albums which do not observe it and thus end up beginning or ending sides on a weak or wandering song which was intended for the middle of the CD release. There's also those albums which are just barely too long to fit on an LP so must be split across two discs.
Art, and indeed freewill as even a basic concept, is the interpretation of the universe around us, not the mechanical creation of such. What a poet might call stirring to the soul is our own view on something, music or a painting or anything else is just a set of data. It's how we view the data that matters.
As someone who tinkers with a music generator I have to warn against talk of replacing humans any time soon.
With computers you get out what you put in. If you put in the rules of some music, you'll get out a piece of music. But it's still humans who are doing the grunt work of defining the rules, the computer is just following them. It's certainly interesting to generate lots of music from a fairly simple set of rules, but being arms-deep in the guts of a music-producing machine really sobers you up to the fact that the products are a human creation through and through.
any half decent composer should be able to imitate a non-living composer... particularly one in the past.
As opposed to a non-living composer ... in the future?
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
even though anybody can copy what a famous artist has done it doesn't mean that if you set it by itself, they'd be able to create it out of nothing by themself
When a computer can come up with original musical ideas, rather than copy the style of some one else's - its trivial to compose in the style of - I'll be suitably impressed, or worried, as the case may be. Otherwise, so what: its just another copy-cat composer that writes in a 300 year old style, good enough for commercials or movies perhaps, but not very interesting.
i went there, and while i'd love to dork out with you and drop street cred. if you went to uc santa cruz you'd also be exposed to gamelan music and all sorts of ear raping sounds.
anyhow, i can pick out composers with startling accuracy. and i don't listen to classical music with the exception of when i dated a girl who was studying classical music. yeah, it's just formulaic. but whatever, i'm also a really good musician and have a kind of perfect pitch, it doesn't matter.
all music is a formula, and it's about looking cool. and part of that is dropping my slashdot karma way down so mod it for me you frickin nerds
Why look for record deals? Generate recordings using that piano-player gizmo they mentioned and put them on a web music "channel" for free and see where it goes. Maybe somebody will be inspired by one of the gazillion tunes to create a masterpiece. I see AI assisting humans as a better bet than trying to do the whole thing itself. He's doing some of that himself now, but letting thousands of others participate will greatly increase his chances. He's stuck in the 90's, like his Mac it seems.
Table-ized A.I.
Once, Oscar Peterson answered to a student, who wanted to impress him by aping him: "yeah, you know what I do, you know, how I do it, but you don't know, WHY I do it". This pattern extracting, rule breaking (made doing so by other rules) program can ape styles, but can it invent new ones? Can it reflect about, what it does? This program reminds me of a more clever version of Karl Jenkins, whose melodies many people find nice but get boring after some pieces, because you begin to know, what musical knowledge and tricks he deploys.
Yes, there is a lot of mathematics underneath music, beginning from very mechanisms of sound creation, over to function of accords and harmonics reaching out to the structure of larger pieces. Every student of musicology knows that. Every student of musicolgy also has to compose smaller pieces after a particular style. It's really not surprising, that a computer program can do it, too. There is probably years of hard work in what Cope did in wading through compositions and writing the program, I won't deny that. But is that really creative? In the times of Mozart, there were a lot of musicians, who "knew the rules". But Mozart remains unique. If he were alive today and listened to Cope's "Mozart" pieces, he would easily outdo them, by inventing something completely different. Computers can analyze the "what" and can apply the "how", but they cannot reflect about the "why".
Have you listened to the music? Sounds like someone badly practicing a third rate imitation of Bach. Better than I could compose, but it aint Bach or Mozart or Beethoven.
Soon those ipod listening teens that have 10th generation "Emily"pods that spontaneously generate the music for them will get tired of all genres and prefer white noise or a cacophony of sound instead.
You raise a good point, namely that we have no idea even today how to quantify creativity. Bach was excellent at carrying out a theme and then throwing in a key change that dramatically altered the sense of the piece. See: Brandenburg concerto no 5, first movement, in the keyboard solo. Furthermore, a certain aspect of music is to show off the skill of the musician, and it's fun to see someone whiz along.
But I doubt the author of the music software ever intended to replace composers - he's just found a way of gleaning a better understanding of what harmonies and melodies are naturally appealing. Good music is more than "pleasant-sounding" melodies and harmonies, though - it should make you think. There's nothing wrong with pop music per se, but it certainly doesn't make you think hard about what's going on.
I would still be careful, though, to say that a computer will never compose something creative. We just haven't gotten there yet.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it dissolve.
. . . when humans do.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Give a computer certain patterns of notes and tell it "patterns in this range are emotionally stimulating; now generate some new emotionally stimulating patterns that fall in this range", it will do just that.
Yes, a human would have to define what is and isn't good music, but once it's defined, a programmer can just give a computer a set of rules to follow and it will crank out one Kilomozart per minute.
In a way that's not new. Think about it, there's always been inspired artists, but there's also always been uninspired makers of "art" who substituted their lack of inspiration/imagination by taking bits of artworks they didn't create and following formulas. The keyword is formula. People have always done things following well defined patterns, recipes, formulas. Sometimes you can hear a joke a deconstruct the formula that must have been used to create it. Same thing with a movie plot.
The difference is, it's a person who "ran" the algorithm, benefiting from the less rigid human intelligence, and the benefit of judgement. So it's more complicated to translate that into an algorithm. But in a way, it's nothing you. If anything, it devaluates formulaic and uninspired works of art, by showing they can be mass produced by machines, and by contrast, increases the value of inspired art. As for an algorithm imitating Bach's style, it's been for centuries that composers have imitated Bach's style (or Mozart, Beethoven etc...). So on top of human copycats now you have computer copycats. Big whoop, because none of this would have been done if Bach had never done what he had done. The true challenge is if an algorithm could create a major composer that never was. In a way in can happen and not happen. It can happen because theoretically a random ASCII generator could write Shakespeare, the corollary is it won't happen because it's doubtful an algorithm would identify a work of genius if it created one, and because the same is doubtful from a human listener/reader.
This being said, it could totally work for pop music. Think about it, for example, a Kanye West algorithm. Use a database of hundreds of records from the 1960s and 1970s, make it randomly loop a sample poorly and annoyingly, add a semi-random pattern of drums, add a poorly sliced speeded up vocal sample to use in the chorus, and there you go! But again, it's just turning a human-executed formula into a computer-executed algorithm.
You just got troll'd!
In fact, Microprose released a very similar concept for the 3DO way back in 1994. Granted technology has moved on, as has the ability to reproduce instruments with much higher fidelity.
However if you actually listen to the music, it's nothing special. In fact it's the sort of painful music you could imagine "nouveau riche" 30 year olds would listen to in order to pretend to be sophisticated, over glasses of california "wine", of course. For all the little ticks this program employs, reproducing patterns of melody and harmony according to some algorithms, it will never ever give us "The 4 Seasons", or something like this (Vanessa Mae BWV 1006).
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Not only will they pass the Turing test when they spontaneously generate a chorus of "Yeah yeah yeah," but the first three songs using both "yeah" and "hey hey" will crack the top 40.
"Computers are incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Human beings are incredibly slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. Together they are powerful beyond imagination." - Albert Einstein
Is that WE can design and build THEM. When they can do the same for self-aware protoplasmic humanoids, it might be time to become upset about silly "supremacy" issues, and not a moment before then. Till then, sit back and enjoy the music...
I see. So you propose a new Turing test for once we have the AI part figured out. Might be interesting to see how machines would "think" about making AI systems themselves, and humanoid constructs. Currently every AI is like a child that is only good at doing one thing brilliantly OR gobbing up tons or data so that it can be asked questions to test their understanding of logic.
First off, this is old news (he debuted it in '87). Second, it's not that surprising. The program analyzes patterns and reproduces them with some variance. You could not feed it your whole music library and have it come up with some brilliant new piece. I'm fairly confident that it would sound awful, because the number of available patterns would, in a sense, give the algorithm too much freedom. You feed it pieces of a certain style by a certain composer, and it gives you back something that resembles them. It's a cool project, but the music is inherently derivative.
If, however, he can get it to start churning out pop music, he could make a millions.
David Cope's system can produce music on the level of a grad student of composition imitating great composers. It has to go through a learning process with lot's of music from the original composer in order to imitate his style. "Original" music hardly. It hasn't produced anything anyone (but a muzack fan) would want to listen to. The controversy surrounding it isn't Ludditism, it's a methodology dispute. How much does he hand-edit his examples after generation? He has not produced a stand-alone version for others to reproduce his results. This is not science, but the religious devotees of scientism propound another triumph of machine over man!
All I see is an article about a man who uses a software program to compose music. (And I really don't find that very newsworthy, btw.) I see no mention of any cybernetic organism in the article at all!
Lemon curry???
The creator had to spend hundreds of hours programing with Bach's compositions before the machine could learn his style, so in effect it's dependent on Bach to compose in his style, same again in regards Mozart. However Bach 'n Mozart were able to create their styles without dependency on being programmed to do those styles in the 1st place, regardless of influences. IOW without Bach or Mozart, etc the machine would not be able to make those compositions in the 1st place.
I expect that a John Williams simulator can't be that far off. Williams is the composer who did the symphony orchestra scores for Jaws, Star Wars, most of Speilberg's works, and other industrial-strength dramatic productions.
As music, his music sucks. Listen to his music without a movie, and it brings to mind the tank commander's motto, "When in doubt, use the main gun." But it carries the production along. With a Williams score, a good production designer, and a big budget, a film can be a success even with a dumb plot and bad acting.
Were Mozart, Beethoven, and... all those other guys people have never heard of (like Chopin, Berlioz, Shubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Copland, Puccini, Mussorgsky, Greig, Handel, Prokofiev, Janacek, Vivaldi, Rossini, Ravel, Respighi, Strauss, Stravinsky, Orff, Offenbach, Bach, Bach, or Bach... the list goes on and on... for extra credit, do you know which of these composers was an American?) merely clever mathematicians?
I think it's unfair to paint them that way, just because a computer can replicate something similar, doesn't mean it used the same process. A good synthesizer can make a sound indistinguishable (by people) from the sound made by a guitar string resonating, by filtering "white-noise" to select only that part of the wave which sounds like said guitar string. This does not mean there's actually a string resonating within the synthesizer. The output may be indistinguishable, but that doesn't mean guitars are no longer useful because there are certain things about a guitar a synthesizer can never replicate. For instance, how good does a synthesizer sound when it has no power? Then again, what about the romance factor? Might as well ask if a chef is necessary, since he/she is, in reality, just a food-chemist. So enjoy your computer-composed music. As for me, I am going to listen to "Billy the Kid Rodeo," or "Night on a Bald Mountain," or "Symphonie Fantastique," or "Sinfonietta," or maybe "Tosca", confident that no computer will ever create anything quite like them.
The machine can only compose in the style of Mozart only after hundreds of hours of programming with Mozart compositions so it can learn that style in the 1st place. (From my quick glance) the creator never claimed that his machine could create a individual style of it's own that could come close to competing with the styles of Mozart 'n Bach, etc.
So the machine has to plagiarise a style before it can compose in that style, it isn't able to innovate it's own composing style. I assume there's the potential for the machine to be programmed with multiple styles concurrently & create a hybrid style that's harmonious, then it's on it might be on it's way to competing with the greats.
I listened to his EMI program's sonata movement in the style of Beethoven and was not impressed. It sounds like it took the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata and just tweaked it a bit. You can find more samples here.
Until then the machine's just a tribute composer.
FTFS: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?
The fact that you are not asking
"If Mozart could write an Emily Howell (the machine) sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what is so special about Emily Howell?"
answers your question.
Good artists borrow. Great artists steal. and by 'steal' I mean add creativity on top to the point where you are the one people want to emulate. That this machine can emulate prolific composers is great, but not a massive surprise to me. I'd be a lot more surprised if it could write something like -- but more importantly *as original as* -- Mozart's Requiem, or the score for Star Wars.
j'ai découvert une démonstration vraiment admirable (de ce théorème général) que cette si
From the perspective of a classically trained musician that does it for a living, I am not feeling too threatened by this for several reasons:
1) I am not a luddite
2) It's impressive, but it's hardly threatening. The examples given in the article were simple in most terms. The color and timbre are uniform throughout and it felt stagnant. It was basically a rhythmic idea and arpeggiated chord changes. While indeed pleasant sounding, the results so far still do not come even close to the names being thrown around.
3) Choices and experiences. For this machine to be truly challenging to mankind it will have to make CHOICES like we can. Not only that but it has to draw on inspiration from the world and it's "life". Composers use techniques that mimic the sounds of life, spell a loved one's name, or paint imagery. This machine would have to WANT to do these things.
4) Don't let the Music Theory 101 courses that we teach fool you. There ARE no rules. At the end of the day, it is all sound. What we call "rules" are simply techniques that we have identified as producing agreeable sounds. In reality you are as free to follow or abandon these ideas as you see fit. You can abandon western tonality and invent your own system if you want. John Cage's "As Slow as Possible" began being performed in 2000...and it'll finish in 639 years. One piece is a recording of the electromagnetic fields of the Earth. Musical innovation is still very much alive. If this machine can't have the desire, inspiration, or the INTELLIGENCE, to innovate such things on its own then us musicians will still have jobs for a very long time....that is until Skynet goes live and hurls a "New"clear World Symphony at us (by Dvorak the computer keyboard and not Antonín Dvoák)!
So here's a piece written by a human: The Serpent's Kiss by Bolcom http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzorssRJce4 . Tell me THAT was composed by a computer and THEN I'll rethink my career choice.
When robots and AI products exhibit creativity, it will be impossible to deny them a soul.
Yeah, but does the computer know if the music its composing is any good? It doesn't have the slightest idea. It doesn't know its best piece from its worst piece. If it can't appreciate music, it has no soul, at least no musical soul.
This ad space for rent.
"the music itself was not encoded in his DNA"
That's correct his DNA told him what sounded good, not how to make what sounds good. To make the sounds Mozart had to use trial and error and compare it to what his DNA told him sounds good. Similarly the computers program told it what sounds good to humans (Mozart) and via trial and error found something that sounds like Mozart.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Musical theory (which this software is based on) is an afterfact. First, the composers (such as Mozart) write the music with what "math" is available to them, but mostly using their ear as the final judge. After a while (centuries), the theorists have enough data to draw conclusions from the common practice of the composers, and usually by that time music changes. This software might account for some classical music (though I imagine not even all that - it probably can't do Schoenberg's type of almost atonal composition), but then there came jazz, suddenly including dissonances that were deeply shunned in classical music. So there again humans made the leap and got more sophisticated, and the theorists (and their machines) were left to simply follow and try to break it into patterns.
And even if it's an algorithm that creates the music, there's a man (or several men - or women) behind it, and the patterns they selected represent their choices among many possibilities. So, in a way, it's their music, and therefore still human-made.
As for Mozart, it really doesn't prove that he wasn't special, but it might prove that you don't need all that complexity to make beautiful music, and maybe finally we can discard our pretentiousness and put blues, jazz, and good rock music on the same level of respectability as tonal classical music. They are worth the same, but as usual it does take us a couple of centuries to accept it.
I would recommend W.A. Mathieu's "Harmonic Experience", Arnold Schoenberg's "Theory of Harmony" and maybe Mark Levine's "Jazz Theory" books to the /.-ers, before rushing into conclusions based only on their experience with VIM and (X)Emacs.
An earlier (2006) piece about David Cope's EMI program was part of the Radiolab podcast. You can listen to it at:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2006/04/21/segments/58293
There is at least one more ingredient that is not being taken into consideration here: reason to write music.
Did Mozart have a reason to write his music? I bet he did. Did his reasons come out of his life experiences? I bet they did. Does a machine have reason to write music other than we tell it to? Not yet. Until a machine can take its 'life' experiences and based on those come up with a reason to create music, it will not be the same, though it may sound similar.
Life experience is what forces people to do things, music is a reflection of their lives. Listen to different composers, you may learn something about their particular life styles, troubles/problems, high points/low points etc. Listen to a machine - you will learn that its 'life' experience is quite limited.
You can't handle the truth.
I've written a program which writes other computer programs, all it needs is a description of the goal in plain English.
It's the last program that will ever need to be written. As of today all programming jobs are obsolete.
No sig today...
Tell you what, ring me again when a piece of software composes something simple that "moves" me.
I've listened to the example tracks and they made me feel nothing, they go nowhere, they have no story, no soul.
Here's a popular track as comparison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2XzoA94Zws
That's a relatively simple piece, well executed. Good luck with your algorithms.
I'm a mathematician by training turned 'computer scientist'. Over the past couple of years I've been working on a declarative, rule based algorithmic composition system and it's been a rather interesting experience. As someone with no 'musical talent' and no real training it's been really cool to be able to 'make music', something that most musicians probably take for granted. However one of the really interesting things is people's reaction to the system. Some are supportive, some are dismissive and we do get the occasional philosophical question ("what does this say about human creativity?", etc.) but they are mostly curious and asked in good nature.
The *only* hostile or negative comments we've had, the only things similar to those described in the article, have been from formal musicians. These responses have been vociferous attacks saying that what we describe is not making music and is not possible (despite the fact that we have a working system). So, my feeling is, that these discussions are more about technophobia and territory than they are to do with the nature of creativity or the existence of the human soul.
[Blatant slashvertisement]
The demo is here:
http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~mjb/anton/anton-2.0-demo.ogg
http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~mjb/anton/anton-2.0-demo.wav
And you can download the system (GPL) here:
http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/~mjb/anton/
[/Blatant slashvertisement]
Perhaps this just highlights how mechanical and un-emotional Mozart was? If the app could create something comparable to Beethoven's works then maybe we are going somewhere.
The other point is that most 'great' music is created in the transitional state of musical styles: think Elvis, but it was the same for Beethoven etc.. The musicians playing the same style were generally not regarded as highly.
Could the app create something 'new' and compelling?
I know Mr. Cope will probably claim copyright for the tunes. But according to copyright law, copyright belongs to the creator of the music piece...
Holy Crap. George Orwell was right.
A machine can create music. The versifacator is real.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versificator_(1984)
nomatter how the 'art' community howls and barks, nomatter how they harrass you, do NOT delete any of your creations again. whats important is making music, and if ANYthing is making music, or any form of art, the rest of 'art' community can go eat shit.
music is a service to people, to engage emotions in them. it does NOT matter what the source of the music is. anything else is intellectual elitism.
Read radical news here
In this summary, for instance, the overblown claim is that the software "creates beautiful, original music." What isn't mentioned is that one of the pieces of software (for there are two) is fed copious amounts of human-created source material to work from, and the other creates musical bits but only keeps the ones that the composer likes--hardly an unassisted process.
beethoven, liszt, and their numerous contemporaries fed themselves inane amounts of bach's music, in addition to numerous other composers before their time. they even composed pieces in bach's style, as a tribute to him, leave aside getting a lot of ideas and techniques from him. (especially contrapunctual techniques).
there isnt a difference in between great composers and this software in that regard.
Read radical news here
I think you all forget the most important thing : though an algorithm has produced these music sheets, it was humans who played them. Computers are nowhere able to play classical music with emotion, I don't even know of any interesting attempts.
For an educated listener, they are huge differences between two interpretations. Four Seasons's Vivaldi live performances styles vary greatly between the English School (classic style) and Italian School (sounds more baroque...Il Giardino Armonico, Bondi, etc.). Between Horowitz and Kempff (two famous pianists), there's a huge difference. The same can be told about symphonic works.
As for the article,
I listened to the two samples and they weren't really great, though of course I couldn't tell if they were computer or (poorly) human-written. Also, I'm not really fond of Mozart. Maybe there are better samples out there, a link would be nice.
I'm astonished that people seem to discover the mathematical harmony that reigns in classical music (and generally in music). Of course composers, interprets and listeners felt that mathematical harmony, and since our brains have amazing abilities to learn, we inconsciously recognize these patterns.
On a fun note, my captcha for posting this comment was "rehearse". Quite related.
online at his site. check the link :
http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/5000.html they are downloadable
and here you can check other emmy pieces http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/works2.htm
Read radical news here
anyone who loves bach should listen these. you wont believe these are synthesized, computer generated music.
Read radical news here
Sorry, but it's not "New Age Nonsense", and therefore it should not die. Your Insightful mod-up came from the rest of your post.
It started with a few famous cases of people with damaged connective nerves being shown pictures in a scope that only projects an image to one eye at a time. In these cases, the patient seeing it in RightEye-LeftBrain could name it, but when switched over, they could not, but could perhaps draw it.
However, it may not be that the Right Brain is "creative" so much as involved in new learning, that then gets solidifed by the left brain. Source - Joseph Chilton Pierce in Biology of Transcendence.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Who is going to pay all the lawyers who fight copyright stuff?
Isnt Britney searching for Emmy? I thought I head it on one of her songs... PLEASE STOP HER! SHE MUST NEVER FIND HER!
Exactly. Emily Howell is not writing any music, in the normal sense of the word. Cope is, using a very weird sort of sheet and pencil. Music composition is using math (mostly in the form of learned habits, but math nonetheless) and your own creativity.
What has changed is the complexity of those mathematics, and the (extremely) shortened feedback loop between pure mechanical/mathematical analysis and adding some input, changing or throwing out what didn't work, etc.
And! He has managed to to embody some of the "habits" of the greats, so he (or a randomizer) can riff off of that - kudos for that! As someone mentions below, it will be interesting whether (when?) we can teach such meta-skills to a computer.
(Meta-Turing-test; a computer is sentient like us, when it can create a program, which can pass the Turing test).
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
You do know machines ALREADY can design machines don't you? In fact, that's how it works right now on very complex projects, although the creative steps are STILL being done mostly by humans because we don't have good enough genetic algorithms to run unsupervised.
AI will never have a soul, until it, like us, it desires to create the other.
What a wonderful article. It exposes the weakness that we refer to as emotion and passion. Tina Turner said it best when she belted out the lyric “Oh what’s Love got to do, got to do with it? What’s Love but a second hand emotion? I ask; why do we selfishly cling to that which can’t be grasped? It all comes down to what we believe. Our core beliefs dictate weather we will accept or reject music solely based on knowing the creator. Is it a human or is it a machine? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.
...but who is playing the piano in those sound samples? Does Emily Howell also say when to play louder and when to play softer? As a piano player myself, this is just as important as the musical notes when it comes to bring an emotional "feel" into the music.
...when software is cranking out classical pieces. But what if in 20 or 30 years I can click a button and 5 seconds later have an original grunge album, sung by John Denver, with lyrics about the automobile industry, featuring a violinist?
Wow.. I may want to get started on that right now.
The cyborg version of facilitated communication.
Ah, the early days!
I guess it's easier to drive down a road after someone else has paved it.
Exactly that. Excellent improvisors like Richard Grayson and Keith Jarrett are perfectly able to improvise in any music style - it's creating something new yet interesting that's difficult.
i remember something like this for the commodore 64, i think it was by sid meyer but i'm not sure. it was always great to put it into infinite creation mode where it would play nonstop never repeating music that flowed really well into various moods.
RIP c64/c128 i miss you.
And when that happens, I bet there will still be people like greg1104, who'll be saying it's not impressive, because the AI programmers are only doing so after reading up on other software programs (you know, just like human programmers do), and "analysing centuries of human knowledge".
focused on one particular instance
Sure, computers are specialised such that although there are some areas they are now better than humans, there are other areas they are way behind. No one is claiming that because a computer can beat a human at chess, it's therefore more intelligent in every respect.
But the point is also that as time goes on, more and more things are being done by computers - and people after the fact inevitably try to claim that it "doesn't count" because it's "bruteforce".
I'd say that humans have a rather unfair advantage - surely we're just bruteforcing things with our billions of neurons, compared to a computer that has to run a program on a single CPU?
Is pretty much math. I'd say the latter, does that detract from the work itself or the artists accomplishment, not at all. We are left with a beautiful piece of art that has been enjoyed for centuries.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
"Triumph of the Cyborg Composer"
You have it right -- it should read "Triumph of the Mathematical Composer". A cyborg is a human who is dependant on implanted devices in his or her body to aid its functions. It's short for cybernetic organism, and a computer algorythm is NOT an organism.
Former US Vice President Dick Cheney is a cyborg. I'm a cyborg. Your grandma's probably a cyborg. But computer generated music is NOT cybernetic.
A "cyborg composer" would be a human composer with an artificial hip, a pacemaker, or some other medical implant. You would think people would use a dictionary or even wikipedia.
Free Martian Whores!
>Implying humans are anything more than very complex molecular patterns.
>Implying music is anything more than a pattern of input that cascades a complex reaction.
Crunchyroll.com has a 6 episode anime called "Time of Eve" detailing a student's struggle to regain his confidence playing the piano after he lost a music competition to a robot. I highly recommend it especially if you are an Asimov fan.
Trying to install linux on my microwave, but keep getting a kernel panic...
I think that we appreciate the arts because they give us some insight into the human condition (the lives that humans lead). It seems reasonable that machines should be able to pick up some of these dominant patterns from mining old human works (which I think is a good thing as it will help us to understand what it is we humans like about those works). However, without understanding human lives I don't think that the machines will be able to innovate, or at least innovate in ways that we appreciate. One could use the program as a tool to produce large volumes of works (based on past human works) and only select the ones that we humans like. However, then I would still argue that humans are doing the artistic work by choosing which innovations we actually like. If machines are one day able to live lives that resonate with the human condition then I would argue that these machines are themselves becoming essentially human.
I also agree with the statements others are making about progress. If you look at art history you see that new works keep adding new layers of complexity (and meaning?) on top of what was previously done.
As the article states, when people listen to music it often evokes an emotional response. This doesn't happen when you simply teach a computer how to play chords and then toss in a random number generator - there must be a story told, some type of structure.
Cope's genius was in defining - admittedly in his own terms - what different portions of a composition were attempting to achieve: "statement, preparation, extension, antecedent, consequent". Once he had defined those and could define how different composers achieved them, he could more easily have the computer express new, cogent themes based on older masters. And because the new themes were expressed using the same techniques, they tended to sound like the the old composers to the point where people could recognize them.
His new "Emily Howell" software is an extension of that capability, but apparently also allows the composer to define their own techniques for achieving "statement, preparation, etc", providing a powerful aide to modern composers. They can start with an idea for a general theme and the software can help expand it into a composition expressed using techniques the composer prefers to use.
In just about any field of human study, things can seem magical until some analytical thinker helps to define the language of the underlying subject, whether that is logic constructs in software, mathematics, physics, or astronomy - or musical composition. Once the language has been defined, it allows us to conceptualize the formerly magical-seeming process as a series of definable operations - i.e. it becomes something humans can understand and talk about.
If Cope is also street-smart, he will productize "Emily Howell" and make it the industry standard for computational assistance in the composing arts.
Go talk with someone with a PHD in neuroscience and they will call the Left Brain (logic) / Right Brain(art) divide nonsense or try and sell you something. There is some task specific specialization between the two sides, however learning takes place in ALL PARTS OF THE BRAIN. Unfortunately, there is also a market for books that perpetuate this nonsense so you can find a lot of sources for this crap, which is written by people that either don't understand what they are talking about or simply chose to misrepresent what they do understand.
PS: Language is localized to more areas than you might expect, the ability to name something is a very specific skill that is separate from understanding what is named. Basically, one part of the brain learns how to name something, another part learns how to understand names, another part learns how to decode speech, another part learns how to decode written language, another part learns how to recognize sounds... etc. (However, each of the above tasks involves several parts of the brain working together so naming something when writing and speaking uses the same areas for part of the task and different areas for other parts.)
Autotune cats! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr-SZXIVvuo
Autotune JFK: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmcCzB8fwLo
Makes you realize how little talent some popular 'artists' have these days.
-Xoltri
That's odd. The message I got clearly stated: Be sure to drink your Ovaltine
Reply to That ||
The left-brain/right-brain stuff is crap because it diverts attention from the more important and basic concepts of creative and logical. It obfuscates reality, and that is why it should be discarded from use by the general public.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
The first is a baroque-styled piece: pretty, simple, very repetitive with only minor variations as it proceeds, and no development.
The second is fairly modern sounding: it develops from simple to more complex and impressive, but throughout the variations are obviously random rather than providing a sense of growth.
The stuff has value; it's good that it's been done; but there's a long way to go. When full, complex symphonies of the quality and complexity created by a Tchaikovsky or Chopin are created, then computer music will have succeeded.
The area of programmatic music is a particular problem. How do you create in the listener the experience of the composer when the composer is a computer?
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Thanks for sharing your thoughts... an illusion of sensations located in a particular area of your brain.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I'm working on a related system to what he describes towards the end of the article -- something that is a partnership between the individual musician and a the computer, to amplify musical creativity, for the Android Smartphone. It's almost ready to release...
People at IBM Research in the past (a decade ago) also did some things also to amplify musical creativity using computers, but unfortunately did not get as much support as they deserved:
http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/musicsketcher/
http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/wwwr_seminar.nsf/pages/sem_abstract_186.html
As David Cope says, part of our musical future may well be more about a partnership.
It's been said, "the woods would be pretty quite if no bird sang there but the best". The real reason to do music is because humans are musical creatures, however they want to express it.
The whole issue of "fame" or "income" is linked to dysfunctional social systems and dysfunctional economic systems. The real issue is that we need a "basic income" for everyone to reflect a human right to draw from the industrial material and informational commons, especially because more and more human labor is becoming worth less and less due to increases in automation, better design, and limited demand (as humans get enough stuff and move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs to self actualization which often can be done fairly cheaply). More ideas I helped put together here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jobless_recovery
And here:
"Ideas for a brickfilm and video games to help avoid a Caprican future"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/cf4ee7f45d631838#
I think we are seeing that now with health care. Much human labor is no longer valuable enough in the USA to earn the money to pay for health insurance -- even as some very few medical specialists who practice medicine or make medical devices (including medical robots) can command vast sums of money for their expertise. Of course, we don't need that many more medical specialists (even if more might be nice), so there is no easy solution to that since we don't need everyone to be a doctor or medical robot maker; so, ultimately, the government will have to intervene more in a dysfunctional marketplace, once the populace moves past the secular religion of "The Market as God".
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99mar/marketgod.htm
Capitalism won't work well unless wealth is widespread, and that means the government has to step in and keep money flowing. Otherwise, the rich just put excess money into a "Casino economy" of derivatives and currency speculation that has little relation to the real world. See:
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
As robots can do more labor, whether creative as in putting together music or physical as in putting together food:
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nv7VUqPE8AE
we will need a completely new economic ideology if we are to survive the irony of real starvation amidst theoretical robot-produced abundance.
People have been talking about this since 1964 and even before:
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Sorry, I think we're going to have to agree to disagree. I consider it New Age nonsense because it stemmed from misunderstanding science, much the same way that people misunderstand Evolution as a progression from lesser to superior lifeforms and other popular misconceptions. The different hemispheres of the brain specialise in different sets of functionality. The popular Left-Right brain meme is wrong because (a) it misrepresents these sets as "artist" and "scientist" which is false both because the hemispheres don't break down like that and because the dichotomy between art and science is predominantly a preconception of modern Western culture that is addicted to stereotypes, (b) ignores the capacity of different parts of the brain to take on work "belonging" to other parts and (c) presupposes that any excellence in one area precludes excellence in another area unless you're some sort of genius abberation. I cheerfully and forefully reject all of those and I'll draw you a picture to show it too, if you find this argument too Right-brain.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
"Your Insightful mod-up came from the rest of your post."
I take a little bit of issue with the rest of his post.
"Firstly, that if a machine could write a symphony like Mozart, then those symphonies are less special. No, just no. Clearly the summary writer doesn't actually listen to or value this sort of music"
Sure, an art enthusiast might, in a blind test, hear/see equal value in two pieces of art, one created by a human and one created by a computer, but art has layers of value beyond just the piece itself.
The history, struggles, etc.. of the artist are often valued when looking at a piece of art. When you listen to it, you think of that history. When you see a painting, you might reflect on what you feel/see by imaging the life of the artist.
A painfully sad song is much more impacting when it is written about an actual painful or sad event that a listener is aware of.
Did the software actually invent, or did it merely copy by reducing Mozart's body of work post-facto to its core elements?
Anyone can copy.
Few can invent.
Your statements are wrong on so many levels, that it's hard to even begin with. First, if someone says "X is a mere Y" or "X is nothing more than a clever combination of Ys" than you should be very cautious of this reductionism. Of course humans are biological machines, but we are also much more than that. It shouldn't be too hard to grasp, that knowledge and culture and language brings a whole new quality to this whole realm of biological machines. We really stand somewhat outside of normal evolution.
And you also describe the work of geniuses as mix of well known things, only . Music for example is based on rules, patterns and it can be expressed or represented in mathematical algorithms. But what composers do is much more. They have musical ideas, they reflect on them, they have a story. And they mix their ideas in unexpected ways (you can analyze this after the fact, but you cannot guess them beforehand). The whole is really more than the sum of it's parts, we need an holistic approach, not a reductionist one
It doesn't surprise me that this example of reductionism is not only accepted, but also lauded here in /. No one likes the unexplainable, unexpected genius, only "hard work" is accepted. And only here can truly soulless music can be appreciated because "the concept of a soul is imaginary anyway". You dehumanized yourself here.
no link? my understanding is that the left-brain right-brain stuff is actually pseudoscience..
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
The album concept derived from an album of 78s as many as twenty per set. So the album structure originally consisted of either the art of anthologizing pieces that would fit on a 12" piece of shellac, or else of finding the right point to break a 20 minute piece of music into chunks that would keep the tension going. while you flipped the disc.
I know it's kind of the ultimate in dead media for people dropping the CD for music files, but there was an amazing art in finding the right point. Now you can get the great performances of the past digitally spliced together so you don't even notice that it happened. People who like rarer classical pieces will understand the skill it took to chop up Warlock's Curlew into such pieces, but if you listen to the contemporary National Gramophone Society recordings it somehow works. For an example of a piece more commonly known, the original release of Rhapsody in Blue (Gershwin) with the Whiteman orchestra (featuring the soloists the jazz cadenzas were written for) has the worst fadeout of all time, utterly anticlimactic.
As Anonymous Coward pointed out (and Pythagoras earlier discovered) music is math.
Humans are good at modeling what they see around them, so it's no wonder someone has come up with a way to make a pretend (sic) composer.
Naturally, the closer it gets to emulating whatever data it was fed (i.e., its world view), the more we humans will appreciate that output as being "in the style" of established works.
The Turing Test here would be to see it come up with a NEW form of music, one completely original, but that still pleases the ear.
I read through this entire topic but no one brought up this point. Mathematics is a model and as much as some would like to believe it is the ultimate form of logic, it is not. It is a model to describe various ideas that can be formed in the human mind. As such, the idea that music is pure mathematics is ludicrous. Much like evolution is a finite description of a much larger process, mathematically describing music can only go so far. Mozart, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, and the other greats were not using any mathematics They were playing with heuristics of music and emotions while adding a dash of random creativity. People are just using mathematics to describe this process in a different vocabulary. There was not an underlying mathematics to it. That does not mean mathematics can not define their style or predict what they could have written. It just means that the summation of all mathematical knowledge is not going to exhaustively describe what a composer would make or do. Mathematics is a model and even the best models will fail sometimes. Truely, this is a discussion of the philosophy of models and their application or limits to the real world. Unfortunately, most of the people here have failed to recognize this.
IIRC in some book from Peter F. Hamilton, set in Commonwealth Universe, there is a composer from alien world visiting an artificial human habitat controlled by powerful A.I.
Essentially same question has been raised in this post has been asked in the book by the composer character when talking with the A.I., something like:
- it took me few month to compose this, can you compose something like that too?
- yes
- can you do it quicker?
- yes
- then why you wanted me to do it if you can do it as good as I and much quicker?
Well, I recommend finding that book and read it - much better than me trying to remember and reproduce the argument.
hany
Fractals are pretty. I like them. But they were made with an algorithm. Does that mean visual art is soulless?
I don't know how many of you read the Classic Sci Fi short story: 'THE MACHINE STOPS'. I think it was an Isaac Asimov or an Arthur C. Clark futurist visionary book of short stories, maybe half a century old. Among other components of a future, computer controlled civilization, he posits that entertaining, elegant, exquisite music will be continually played wherever Humans interact, and it will all be computer composed and generated. He posits that after a few generations, human nature being what it is, these civilization will in time lose touch with both how and why computers are able to accomplish these things and will lose touch with how to do much else with them. At some point the computers will all mysteriously, simultaneously start crapping out, much to the shock, surprise and denial of the public, as well as political leadership who haplessly try to reassure everyone that the increasingly discordant music and other areas of their life are just fine, and that there is no need to worry. The day finally arrives that the whole system shuts down and civilization is perfectly helpless to get these tools back to assisting us, because everyone has become fat and lazy. Right on for that visionary realization that ever increasingly powerful, sophisticated computers would eventually de-skill even creative areas of human life. Not so sure about ceding the loss of control increasing to systems we will in time no longer fully understand, once wealth, prosperity and humanity's destructive tendencies are managed down to a tolerable - even nonexistant level. Another story in that book, I believe was a story about a musical algorithm that hit the listener with an steady, endless stream of music so emotionally powerful that the listener was rendered, sort of like a lotus eater, or an addict in an opium den, so overpowered he would neither want to stop or escape - and would just waste away. I think that the music was custom tailored to the brain synapse patterns within the individual listener. This concept of incredible, aesthetically beautiful (artificial) music almost takes on heroic, classical Greek Mythologic proportions, like Narcissus who wasted away peering at his reflection in the water.
"If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart?"
First of all, no machine has ever 'written' anything comparable to great music. The result can be no better than the algorithm, and an adequate algorithm would be beyond even those great composers who benefited from the gift of creating great music. It flows, as does emotion, from an inscrutable source.
If a machine *could* do that, it would have learned (as did all the greats) from the example of those who came before. But great music is liberated from the tutorials that confine ordinary music, and that comes from a combination of mastery of musical language and a faculty of freedom to receive and express. Call it indomitable spirit, or whatever. Such a machine would deserve as much credit as the human 'machines' that created, overcoming all odds against it -- poverty and ignorance and jealousy and the deliberate obstructions of the small-minded -- the great music.
Personally I don't care who or what authors great music ... I'll take it when I can get it.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson