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?'"
People are always threatened when they feel they can be replaced by automation. Do I get bonus points for quoting Trek?
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 ...
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?
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.
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.
That's kind of what drove Cope. Early on he found his synthetic process could create musical sentences and phrases that were grammatically and syntactically correct, like your first year computer student. But stringing them together didn't produce a musical work any more than a collection of sentences makes a story. Even putting similar concepts together gave tiresome blobs that didn't have "soul".
What he did was drill deeper and deeper into the works of the composers, and figured out what made their music stand out. He discovered it was not just following the rules, but was related to breaking the rules, and how they broke them. Randomly breaking them didn't accomplish the task. He instead identified their pattern of "rule breaking" and codified it, and copied it, and that's when Emmy's music became moving.
No, it's not impossible, but it was a huge feat of analyzing huge piles of music by the masters, categorizing and labeling measures, phrases, and concepts in ways that had never been explored before.
Y'know, when described that way it sounds like the TV Tropes Story Generator on steroids, with MIDI output. Hmm...
John
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.
The critical question is who judges the quality. This music (I'm listening to it now), is a little simplistic, but pleasant enough. It sounds like a Sine wave on the keyboard - comparisons to Mozart are premature. But what I want to know is did the computer run its algorithms many times and eventually the programmer picked the best and said: "Behold!" We're not there until the machine itself says: "This one" and tells the programmer which is the best piece it's done.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.