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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Indeed. Just about all the music we hear today is run through something called "Auto-Tune", a piece of software which corrects any wrong notes sung by the performer, matching them automatically to the song's score.
There's a number of videos on YouTube showing before & after takes of incredibly bad singing turned into mainstream pop music (with perfect pitch).
It can be obvious, like Cher, or it can be nigh-undetectable, but either way it means the human 'soul' has left music long ago. If you can work the software, you can sound every bit as good as the best musicians of the past without a day of musical training.
Apparently, the computer can even compose your score, now, too.
Is that really such a huge loss, though? Take Auto-Tune for instance: the good performers will still put in the effort, so that they do not become reliant upon cheap software tricks - and, conversely, those people who might otherwise never have been able to perform music (because they were born partially deaf, for instance) now have the same opportunities as the rest of us. The field moves beyond mastering pitch and explores the deeper mysteries of music. Progress happens.
Same, too, with the composition of music. Software like this will help us to understand what it is that makes music 'tick', and lead to better music in the future. Maybe some asshole with a 'music interpretation' degree will lose his job because, as it turns out, his core thesis of "Mozart was magic" turns out to be false, and it turns out anyone can be Mozart if they, too, understand what he learned through long experience. So what, though? That guy should be happy that, if he puts in the effort, science has given him the opportunity to finally contribute to the field he's been leeching off for so long. Composing becomes easier to learn and teach. The field moves on. Progress happens.
Simple as that.
The article:
Standing on the shoulders of giants and all that. Sure, he reduced Bach and Mozarts' styles to mere algorithms, but the point is that Bach and Mozart invented those styles. The influence of prior art is not always evident, so when this guy creates his own algorithms, he will be influenced by the styles of Bach and Mozart -- but on an algorithmic level as well as a musical level. Music generated by a computer using a glorified form of cut-and-paste is music, but it is not art. Sure, math explains everything...but some human genius came up with those ideas first. Computer-generated compositions that weren't based on others' styles sound like third-rate outtakes from Frank Zappa's Jazz from Hell album. The article again:
Oh shit, did I just lose the game?
The great composers might not have done it through conscious math. They may simply have been "wired" that way, to hear music, to break it down into its components, and then reassemble them with their own style. We don't know, because they're gone.
Cope, on the other hand, waded through their work, identifying phrase after phrase, cataloging and quantifying what they had done, and spotted the very patterns by which they broke the rules. More importantly he figured out how to describe and codify those patterns. The analysis process took him years. Writing the software was possibly the easiest part of the whole task.
And once he was done, he was able to quantify other musicians work, and discovered that styles were plagiarized all over the place. Perhaps not consciously, but he found that composers everywhere and everywhen were building upon the music of their predecessors.
That's a metric ton of hard, grinding work, and is definitely evidence of higher brain power than J. Random Slashdotter. (And likely a severe case of OCD.)
John
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. ;)
If you can work the software, you can sound every bit as good as the best musicians of the past without a day of musical training.
Not exactly. Auto-tune is basically a float-to-integer converter for your voice, plus the ability to lock into a given scale or in extreme cases to an arbitrary pitch fed to it through MIDI, more like a vocoder. If you should be singing a C and you sing a half-assed flat A instead, it's going to change it to a pristine A (with that nasty hard edge that lets close listeners know you're using a tuner). For someone who isn't completely tone-deaf, this will allow them to perform as well as a good singer, but "the best musicians of the past" also composed at a more elite level than your average person. The craft has to be of quality to make it worth listening to; a perfectly pitched cover of a Blink 182 song is still going to sound like crap (come to think of it, I'm pretty sure they auto-tune).
Apparently, the computer can even compose your score, now, too.
Again, not exactly. From the article:
This program [called Emily Howell] would write music in an odd sort of way. Instead of spitting out a full score, it converses with Cope through the keyboard and mouse. He asks it a musical question, feeding in some compositions or a musical phrase. The program responds with its own musical statement. He says “yes” or “no,” and he’ll send it more information and then look at the output. The program builds what’s called an association network — certain musical statements and relationships between notes are weighted as “good,” others as “bad.” Eventually, the exchange produces a score, either in sections or as one long piece.
Cope, the software's author, clearly plays a role in the creation. The machine spits out ideas and he keeps the ones he likes. Later in the article he says his new focus is in using "on-the-fly programs" to come up with quick and dirty sketches of musical ideas to use in his own compositions. The first program, Emmy, relied on volumes of material from a composer to write new works in their style. Cope fed Emmy his work and the ensuing piece was one of the most highly rated in his career. And yet, it took Emmy dozens of inputs to produce that piece, and each of those pieces was hand-crafted by a human being. All this means is that computers will continue to be wonderful tools; they have already greatly lowered the bar for entry into the act of music creation, yet they have not raised the quality. If anything the opposite is true.
Progress happens.
"Progress" is a tricky term to use with music or any of the arts. New people (or machines!) try new things and spur others to do the same, but probably everyone here can think of a recent (20th century) song performed by a single singer and an acoustic guitar that is very moving. The guitar is over 800 years old, the scale it uses has only 12 tones, and the song you're thinking of likely has five chords in it at the most, yet their convergence in this particular manner results in something that resonates with you. In the realm of art, it is the particular that matters, and progress concerns itself with generalities. That is to say, there is no more chance of finding out what makes music "tick" as there is in why your favorite film is your favorite: there are thousands of reasons even for people who love the same film, and there are thousands of films to choose from.
Your brain is not a computer.