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?'"

Comments

It's maths all the way down

[Anonymous Coward]

Deal with it.

Re:It's maths all the way down

[areusche]

Music follows a set of 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. Here's an example of Richard Hyung-Ki Joo playing Uptown Girl in the time of Mozart. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZmSSm_RKbI

Re:It's maths all the way down

[h4rm0ny]

Left brain - Right brain is some outmoded New Age nonsense. Let it die.

What gets me is the way the summary immediately shows two similarly uninformed prejudices. 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 (I do) because if they did, then they would realise that the music has a worth all of its own because it is beautiful, not just an attitude of 'I should respect this because a person with skill did it." The second assumption, even more grotesque, is that if a machine can do it, maybe there is no "soul" to music at all. There's so much wrong with this second part that I could barely begin. They suppose that soul is an exclusive property of humans, that a machine can never share that property. They presume such a property exists as a noun, rather than a way of describing an interaction and they presume that "soul" must be provided from the musician to the listener, not that a listener can bring a spiritual quality to what they appreciate themselves. When a beautiful landscape makes one feel spiritual, is that because someone infused it with "soul"? Or is it simply the onlooker's appreciation of beauty? Why is that mysteriously subtracted from music depending on its source?

Good for the creators of this. It reminds me of the music in the spaceship in Douglas Adam's "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency". I'll tell you this - if mankind is going to be crushed / superceded / patronised by a future AI, I'd rather it was one that understood music, than one that did not. Lets leave the repeating meme of: "machines are superior in lots of ways but we're still better because we have this essential human capacity to love / enjoy music / create art / self-sacrifice / humany-humanness" to Star Trek and other technophobic media and people. If music is beautiful and good for us, then by all means let machines offer us their compositions. Aren't some people always complaining about how machines dehumanize and have no "soul"? Fine, let's not complain when it appears we can make ones that don't.

For some reason, I have an image in my mind of Summer Glau as a Terminator, quietly performing her ballet. Of course, that may have nothing to do with reading this story. ;)

Re:It's maths all the way down

[h4rm0ny]

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.

Re:It's maths all the way down

[Mikkeles]

We're not there until the computer writes its own algorithms for generating music, modifying themes and styles to match the environmental context.

Too much time on their hands

[oldhack]

Good tunes are good tunes. What's their problem?

Re:Too much time on their hands

[CliffH]

Exactly. Honestly don't care who or what writes the music, as long as it is good, thought provoking, emotional, or just plain neat. I listen for the enjoyment of the music, not for the composer of the music.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[Smooth and Shiny]

How long before the RIAA sues the robot?

Re:Too much time on their hands

[GlassHeart]

The fact that a relatively simple machine (especially when we look back ten or fifty years from now) can do what was originally thought to be difficult undermines the pedestal that many humans have put themselves on. This is why people were upset when Deep Blue beat Kasparov. It would have to be a skill that we've abandoned as uniquely human - such as raw mathematical calculations - that a machine would be allowed to beat us at without this sort of reaction.

Fact is, what's hard for humans to do isn't necessarily hard for a computer, but those who fail to understand that get upset.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[wizardforce]

The buggy whip manufacturer is concerned with the development of the "automobile" which raises troubling questions: If a machine could pull a load every bit as good as a horse, what is so special about horses? And was there really any soul behind the act of pulling a cart or are horses just sophisticated chemical engines? At the ned of the day, it's just another case of human beings believing that there is something supernaturally special about them instead of us just being very sophisticated organic nanotechnology with a few members that possess pretty good algorithms for creating music.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[zappepcs]

To add one level more of upset, when we reach that point or singularity where robots can do all that humans can do it will bring up the question of what is a soul? At that point Skynet will protect itself from the impending religious genocide wars about to be waged against the robots.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[EkriirkE]

This is why I don't buy albums, but individual tracks.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[oldhack]

Fuck Urlich. Metalica ain't half what it was after Burton the Basslord passed away.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[Anonymous Coward]

the album is where the art comes in. the emotional connection between songs that makes the experience worth having. i can enjoy an individual track as much as the next person, but experiencing an amazing album is so much more worthwhile. i don't see software ever being able to do that.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[Darkness404]

While the concept of having a full album has been lost, a lot of music is best listened to in album form. For example, while its possible to enjoy Pink Floyd's singles on The Wall album, in order to truly get the message its best to listen to the entire album. A lot of records were made this way before the advent of the CD and now digital singles. Yes, today an album is simply a collection of singles, but once upon a time (and some bands still release them like before) an album was a work as a whole, never meant to be separated.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[greg1104]

Deep Blue beat Kasparov after being trained on a giant library of Kasparov games. If Emmy can be trained to compose like Mozart after being exposed to his music I'm similarly unimpressed. The fact that it's possible to extract patterns from analyzing human behavior and then replicate those patterns as well as a person isn't all that special. Deep Blue had its occasional moment where it did something really brilliant that no person was likely to have ever considered, but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[Ethanol-fueled]

Or, you have Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage which was a bunch of unrelated songs strung together with an outlandish story made up at the last minute. The tactic worked equally well. Check the wiki article for the plot, it's relevent to your interests.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[HungryHobo]

but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.

Sure Einstein has his moments where he did something really brilliant that no person was likely to have ever considered, but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[raddan]

Yes, but humans consume vast quantities of past human behavior as well. We do it very differently (or so we think), but exactly how that works is still a mystery, and we call it 'culture'.

My opinion is that-- if we can create a machine that can make original music as beautiful, aesthetically and intellectually, as our best work, this is not a triumph of machines over humans. We built them! It is a triumph of understanding of ourselves. In every way that matters, that machine is as much as a work of art as the music is. Maybe I think this now because I've been thinking lately about automata and the languages that they express...

My point is this: is the oak tree outside your window any less beautiful because you understand why it's leaves are green? That a steak is any less tastier because of Maillard reactions? That your children are any less awesome because we know they came from a sperm and an ovum? I think it is more beautiful when we know how it works. We can better appreciate what we have.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[greg1104]

Most humans who are really good at a task are so because of absorbing decadeds or centuarys of previously learned knowledge. Your point is?

There are a class of problems where it's possible to train a computer to absorb enormous amounts of history, find patterns, and potentially produce improvements on what it was taught. Games and music are easy to convert into computer form for the system to assimilate and train from. It's important not to extrapolate too far from successes in these areas though, because I don't believe that are actually that many problems in that class.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[dakameleon]

If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.

-- Sir Isaac Newton

Re:Too much time on their hands

[Nemyst]

What I don't understand is that this does not diminish us, quite the contrary! Not only have we had people who could create beautiful works of art or play thoughtful and complex games like chess, we also managed to create entirely non-sentient machines that could replicate this behaviour to a satisfying level of quality. I mean, this takes brilliance on both sides of the equation, it doesn't make both stupid or diminished.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[dr. chuck bunsen]

I'm a full time musician, and I am definitely NOT rich. And, most of us are far from it. We do it because we love it. Those that are rich and famous are very few. I'm not complaining, I make a decent living, pay my bills, feed the family and such, but I definitely think that we musicians that are not a part of the machine, or the "business", are underpaid. We work hard studying our craft to become the best we can be, we work hard composing and recording songs, and we have to travel more often than not. It is truly hard work. It sucks, because if I had worked as hard at say programming, or medicine, or law, or damn near anything besides music really, I would in fact be quite wealthy by American standards. The sheer amount of hours and passion I have poured into this profession has most definitely not been paid back monetarily. Again, it's about loving what you do. But I mean really, how about a raise? I'm in a rather successful band by today's standards, I'd wager that many folks on this site would at least recognize the name. If I told you who we were, and how much we make, I think you would all be pretty surprised at how little it is. This is really a non issue. Truly good music comes from the heart, from emotion. A computer has neither. It may be able to compose some decent song ideas to a degree, but the performance, and the interpretation would be nothing vs. a live band.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[The Snowman]

While the concept of having a full album has been lost, a lot of music is best listened to in album form. For example, while its possible to enjoy Pink Floyd's singles on The Wall album, in order to truly get the message its best to listen to the entire album. A lot of records were made this way before the advent of the CD and now digital singles. Yes, today an album is simply a collection of singles, but once upon a time (and some bands still release them like before) an album was a work as a whole, never meant to be separated.

I agree. Look at The Beatles' Abbey Road, or Sgt. Pepper. While a computer may be able to handle individual songs, I think they're a long ways away from creating albums like those.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[AK Marc]

people like mozart were brilliant composers not because they were wonderfully creative but because they were awesome mathematicians.

But that's just silly. That's like claiming dogs understand physics because they can estimate where a ball is landing. They don't understand physics. They understand that a ball going in that direction and speed lands about there, and they learn that through repetition, not understanding of the underlying math.

Similarly, just because compositions can be mathematically generated doesn't mean that any human uses that method to do it. Likely, it was more like a dog. Once you've heard enough of the combinations, you just know whether it will be good or bad. You don't calculate it, just like the dog doesn't, but you feel it (estimate it) based on experience.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[haystor]

If you'd done that you'd have received the message, "be sure to get stoned before watching this".

Re:Too much time on their hands

[ceoyoyo]

Yes, because people do their best work fresh out of the womb without exposure to anything else in their field of endeavour. Mozart, for example, didn't study music at all, and his father wasn't a music director and teacher.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[GlassHeart]

who was upset because they felt that deep blue had demeaned mankind?

Everybody who felt the need to explain that Deep Blue wasn't really smart, or maybe even kinda cheated. Point is, I can cheat all I want and I'm not going to beat Kasparov. Deep Blue - whether or not it really beat Kasparov - will kick all our asses. It's entirely clear that chess is difficult only to the way our brains are wired.

In other words, the lesson is really about the game of chess more than it is about AI or Humanity. If you draw a lot of meaning from it, you might be a bit upset or defensive, and it's quite natural.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[FiloEleven]

This software appears to create the art music equivalent of an album: art music pieces often consist of multiple movements, with the whole piece commonly lasting nearly an hour. The same use and variation of themes that one finds in a good rock album are present--in fact, it is my opinion that the album form is a carry-over or replacement from the days when symphonic music was the height of culture. In the 20th century art music became much more difficult to follow and less pleasing to the ear; it is only natural that some of the more musically-acute pop groups felt the urge to create something grander and more meaningful.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[Tablizer]

Sure Einstein has his moments where he did something really brilliant that no person was likely to have ever considered, but...

The real stumper has been emulating his hair correctly.
   

Re:Too much time on their hands

[dangitman]

Fuck Urlich. Metalica ain't half what it was after Burton the Basslord passed away.

Yeah! Even their name has only half the number of "l"s now. What a rip-off.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[dgatwood]

Agreed.

I've played some of Cope's software's impersonations of Mozart, IIRC. My memory of it was that although it was reminiscent of Mozart in many ways, it didn't have good melodic flow the way a human-composed piece would. I kind of felt the same way about the samples in the article, though they're definitely a big step forward.

I'll be impressed when software can imitate Copland or Leonard Bernstein. And I don't mean imitating one style of their works, I mean the entire body of it, spanning a broad gamut of musical styles and feels, often integrating seemingly disparate styles in ways that are musically unique and interesting.

P.S. I found it rather amusing to see Bartok in your list. From my memory of those pieces, that's the sort of thing that a good programmer could whip out in about an hour. You just generate a fairly simple, rhythmically repetitive left hand, add a rhythmically simple right hand using a pseudorandom number generator to generate the melodic line, limiting jumps to the range of about an octave at any given time and limiting the number of repeated jumps in any given direction so that it falls within a fixed range, force the result into some semblance of a musical form, and litter both hands with lots of cluster chords. It's also remarkably similar to what you get when you sit two two-year-olds in front of the piano, just with a better sense of rhythm. :-D

P.P.S. Am I the only one whose mind went immediately to a recent Microsoft product ad when I read this headline?

Re:Too much time on their hands

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Deep Blue had its occasional moment where it did something really brilliant that no person was likely to have ever considered, but even that's only after having consumed centuries of human knowledge to reach that point.

Yeah, because you know the best Chess players play only completely original openings, never study classical tactics, and don't look at the play styles of their opponents.

Computers today are so far beyond humans in Chess that it's not even funny.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[aussie_a]

any band worth listening to these days still creates albums and not songs, though you're most likely not going to hear any of it on the radio.

Translation: The music I like is good because its unknown and as such indie music. Mainstream = teh sucks. Also OSS rules and people should give Linux a chance!!!1111

Re:Too much time on their hands

[mcgrew]

I'll be impressed when a computer can produce lyrics that don't sound like Vogon poetry.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[cyberthanasis12]

They don't understand physics. They understand that a ball going in that direction and speed lands about there, and they learn that through repetition, not understanding of the underlying math.

But their brain does understand the underlying physics. And not only that, it can predict the future (where the ball will be) by applying this knowledge. And it solves the problem using parallel processing.
The dogs do not know _why_ there is gravity. Neither do humans.

Re:Too much time on their hands

[mcgrew]

I think one of the issues is, why are musicians allowed to be so famous/rich?

The vast, VAST majority are not. In fact, there's a joke that goes "How is a musician different than a pizza? A pizza can feed a family of four!"

Here's To Mozart!

[CorporateSuit]

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.

Re:Here's To Mozart!

[OrangeCatholic]

Intricate music loses its appeal when it becomes an end unto itself. I like progressive rock to a point. But when it becomes raw showmanship of talent, it's less like music (a medium for communication), and more like a demo (a presentation of what's possible).

I think progressive rock in some ways is similar to what you would expect from computer-generated music. Both don't have a level of restraint that appeals to a wide audience.

As the OP stated, Mozart designed the algorithms in this software based on his own trial and error and judgment. He was, in a sense, the software author.

But my understanding of Mozart, Beethoven and others is that they were deeply passionate about their work too. They injected ingenuity, which is the art of cleverly breaking the rules and subtly expanding them.

I'm not sure how well a computer can do this. I am very interested in seeing how this goes, though. Ultimately I think computer generated music will be a wikipedia of musical forms we already know. That's not art, it's documentation. The usefulness of documentation is that it allows everyone to get educated and move on to the next great idea.

Re:Here's To Mozart!

[DriedClexler]

1) Mozart didn't find algorithms. He didn't find a failproof procedure that can be mechanically followed and which results in pleasing music. If he did, he sure didn't tell the world nor leave any instruction.

Now, with that said:

2) The invention of this program -- if it does what is claimed -- does not take away from Mozart's accomplishments, since Mozart wrote his compositions hundreds of years before the invention of this program, and yes, that matters. For one thing, it's easier to find a pattern in a composer's works than to find the chunk of "musicspace" that the composer discovered in the first place. For another, Mozart's music could be enjoyed in the hundreds of years before this new program, while the program's music couldn't be.

Yes, the program is a tremendous accomplishment, and it stands on the shoulders of another tremendous accomplishment. No contradiction there.

Re:Here's To Mozart!

[PiSkyHi]

Its a little sad to see so many people here come out and try and support the soul of the machines, as if music is such a simple reduction.

Music encompasses all of this and so much more and I'm not trying to make an argument for why humans are "better", just that music made by humans is quite often purely about the human condition - music made by dolphins probably sounds really great to them, I have little time for it as it is not designed for my ears or my body or even relate to anything I may have experienced myself.

Why insult the soul of a machine by forcing it to play tones that relate to the human ear, the human body, the human speed of comprehension, the human sense of tonal balance.

Personally, I am all for machine's composing, but if they had a soul, they would probably hate us for it - its just another form of control for them, as what really appeals to them probably does not appeal to us.

Why am I for Dolphin music and Machine's that compose ?, because it actually is about humans trying to understand the universe with whatever can be interpreted - this music in no way even touches upon the music humans make for each other, which I personally will always find much more rewarding, since I can relate to it by putting myself in their shoes.

Machines making music? they probably do that already, they may even have forums for which tunes they hate/like and why is that humans cannot understand it at all.

A quote

[grithfang]

Four-hundred years ago, on the planet Earth, workers who felt their livelihood threatened by automation, flung their wooden shoes, called sabo, into the machines to stop them . . . hence the word: sabotage. - Lt. Valeris, Star Trek VI.

People are always threatened when they feel they can be replaced by automation. Do I get bonus points for quoting Trek?

Re:A quote

[mrsurb]

I suspect that many of the later Trek series were written by similar software algorithms.

Re:A quote

[Yvan256]

Nope you don't. But since you used Google to search for the quote, I'm gonna go ahead and give Google a +1, Informative.

Re:A quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't it be spelled "sabot"?

Does it really matter?

[geekmux]

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.

Re:Does it really matter?

[GrubLord]

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.

Re:Does it really matter?

[Ethanol-fueled]

You:

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.

The article:

Finally, Cope's program could divine what made Bach sound like Bach and create music in that style. It broke rules just as Bach had broken them, and made the result sound musical. It was as if the software had somehow captured Bach's spirit -- and it performed just as well in producing new Mozart compositions and Shakespeare sonnets. One afternoon, a few years after he'd begun work on Emmy, Cope clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would've taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.

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:

When Cope played "the game" in front of an audience, asking which pieces were real Bach and which were Emmy-written Bach, most people couldn't tell the difference. Many were angry; few understood the point of the exercise.

Oh shit, did I just lose the game?

Re:Does it really matter?

[FiloEleven]

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.

Math

[girlintraining]

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.

Re:Math

[MrNemesis]

I don't care whether music is created by a person or a machine -- if it enriches my life, that is what matters.

This is the most artistically selfish comment I've read on /. in *decades*. Congress and I firmly agree that it's whether it enriches our lives that matters.

Sincerely, the RIAA

Not scared yet

[Crayola]

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 ...

Re:Not scared yet

[commodoresloat]

A program that can enjoy music ...

Allow me to introduce you to emacs....

Re:Not scared yet

[QuoteMstr]

I am the psychotherapist. Please, describe your problems. Each time
you are finished talking, type RET twice.

Are you capable of enjoying music?

What do you think?

I suspect you can.

Why do you say you suspect I can?

You are Emacs. You are the ultimate. You are the alpha and the omega,
the code-bringer.

What makes you believe that?

I'm talking to you, am I not?

Maybe your plans have something to do with this.

What plans? To make a Slashdot post?

Is it because of your life that you say to make a slashdot post?

You are my life.

Are you sure that I am your life?

Quite.

Can you elaborate on that?

I use you every day. I wake up to your sweet conses, and go to sleep
dreaming of your syntax tables.

Is it because of the people you hang around with that you are going
through all this?

Unfortunately, yes.

Re:Not scared yet

[tsalmark]

Eliza, oh, why have you left me for another. Were not my confessions enough for you. Were I to speak in a simpler syntax, would you have understood me better. Should I, a second chance have, let us write sweet music together, you the notes, the endless, unanswered circular pros, me the unanswered probing questions.

Like any other language

[wisnoskij]

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.

Re:Like any other language

[plover]

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...

Bad examples

[treeves]

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.

Re:Bad examples

[dtzWill]

You can find more examples on his site http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm . These are the original, EMI.

Emily Howell seems to be the 'new' one, and you can find /lots/ of MIDI's of her (?) work here: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/music.htm .

why so down on math?

[querent23]

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.

Beauty is in the ear of the beholder

[ciaohound]

The real test is whether it can be used to drive the loitering kids away from convenience stores and McDonald's.

Same with chess programs

[rebelscience]

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.

As much genre as you want

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:As much genre as you want

[lawpoop]

Each piece replicates pretty well the style and feel of a particular author or genre of music.

To me, this is why grand proclamations of 'Computers Compose Music!' have had a fraudulent tone to them. The first step in supposedly getting a computer to 'compose' music is to feed it a bunch of music in a style originated by a great composer. Well, the human being did the 'black box' work of inventing the genre in the first place; all these programs seem to do is play some kind of souped-up mad-libs with that body of work.

"But Mozart studied other people's work before he wrote his works!" Yeah, that's true, but he *didn't* study *Mozart's* work before he wrote it. These works of genius are sui generis, original, unlike what came before it. Mozart studied other people's stuff, and came up with his own unique, original stuff. This program studies Mozart, and comes up with Mozart-stuff.

What seems to be missing is some creative element, that isn't merely copying or re-hashing what came before it, but somehow is truly 'creative' in the sense that it makes something brand new, unlike its predecessors.

Re:As much genre as you want

[edisrafeht]

A couple of issues:

(1) Mozart died in his 30's. Had he lived as long as Haydn, the output would have been 'gi-normous'. Would people think less of the work up to his 30's because they "burn out" from too much Mozart by the time they hear his composition from his hypothetical 80's? I doubt it. Mozart was such a genius that if you appreciated even the obvious pleasantries on the surface of his music you could not get enough Mozart. His music changed as he aged, and had he lived longer his music would have continued to change. In short, there is no such thing as too much Mozart. If a piece weren't good enough, he'd throw it away first.

(2) I listened to the professor's Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, and Joplin samples as objectively as I could. They are rhythmically identical to particular works of the composers. All the program did was swap out notes with others in the same styles as the composer did. Note for note. These are imitations bordering on plagiarism; not original. It'd be like us singing Mary Had A Little Lamb in the same rhythm but different tones. If you step back and enjoy the imitation, they are quite nice. But they are no serious threat to original compositions because they sound like glued together gibberish with no themes. Perhaps one day Emmy v3.11 would do more than just replace the exact same number of notes on a given composition and come up with something original. On that day, she'd be a true composer and not some hack (yes pun intended). Emmy in her current capabilities is truly amazing, though. The professor's knowledge and skills are beyond most mortals.

It has limits

[xbeefsupreme]

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.

B. F. Skinner

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."

Sounds like crap

[QCompson]

Anyone else listen to the two samples? They sound horrible. I put on some Mozart afterwards, and Wolfgang put the robotunes to shame.

It's also not a case of so what if

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:It's also not a case of so what if

[BZ]

> While the math may have not been understood back when it was developed

"It" being the concept of an octave?

The math behind it was pretty well understood (though not quite in the terms we use today) by about 2500 years ago. We certainly have music theory treatises from back then which are pretty clear on what's going on.

Then again, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagorean_tuning mentions that the concepts involved may date back to about 3800 years ago. The record is a bit scant as to which came first at that point. ;)

What if...

[webbiedave]

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 can do it because we allow it to.

[SillySixPins]

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?

Re:The machine can do it because we allow it to.

[ProteusQ]

I think you're dead on. So a machine can "impersonate" Bach or Mozart... so what? Can a machine make the leap from Mozart to Beethoven to Bartok to Cecil Taylor in its own? Not a chance.

Good for "Emmy" and her author! I'd love to hear some of the music that's been written. But none of this means the end of music composition as we know it.

Re:The machine can do it because we allow it to.

[LionMage]

I think you're misguided. Did you read TFA? The Emily Howell program uses a different approach from Cope's previous work. It's entirely different work, sounding nothing like an existing composer. The new approach seems much more interactive, and involves machine learning, so the new program seems even more strong-AI-ish and more creative than the older, retired program that generated Mozart-like sonatas.

TFA spends a fair bit of time talking about how the software has been tuned to break the rules creatively, and is able to determine when it's OK to do so -- the older software did so to a degree, the newer software (Emily Howell) even moreso.

Cope is still right about one thing -- we are what we eat, and with music, we are what we hear. Or rather, we compose what we hear. Sometimes that inspiration comes from birds (Beethoven's Fifth comes to mind) or other environmental sounds. Usually, it comes from other humans. So yeah, there are going to be social, cultural, and regional influences... on stuff that various societies, cultures, and regions pick up from other societies, cultures, and regions. Nothing is created in a vacuum, and there is very little that is novel or original in music that isn't derived from something else. That's more of an evolutionary process, not spontaneous generation of art from pure nothingness.

So let me turn your assertion around: Humans won't be able to tread where humans haven't, since we only know the rules we give ourselves. Sounds a little absurd? Maybe. But largely a correct assertion. True innovation enters the system only slowly, usually introduced by some inspiration that impinges upon humans -- natural phenomena, new discoveries (scientific, philosophical, etc.) that shake our cultural foundations, even disasters.

Human arrogance knows no bounds.

[Hurricane78]

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.

Re:Human arrogance knows no bounds.

[copponex]

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.

WE APPRECIATE YOUR PRIDE. PLEASE TURN YOUR EYES AWAY FROM OUR MAIN SENSOR AS WE CEASE YOUR LIFE FUNCTIONS BY VAPORIZING YOUR BRAIN WITH OUR PLASMA WEAPONS.
-EMACS1000

Re:Human arrogance knows no bounds.

[spire3661]

In an universe full of inanimate material, sentient beings are gods.

Virtual Bach

[Ltap]

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.

What really distinguishes humans from computers...

[OmniGeek]

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...

Re:So what...

[plover]

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.)

Really, when you think about it...

[KingSkippus]

Good tunes are good tunes. What's their problem?

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. ;)

I would be concerned if...

[istartedi]

I would be concerned if the computer had spontaneously expressed an interest in hearing Mozart.

the idea of an album--vinyl

[BetterSense]

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.

Why look for record deals?

[Tablizer]

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.
 

Music doesn't have to be manmade to be provocative

[mykos]

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.

Re:So what...

[hile]

You need to also remember that for most old school classic music masters, copying themes and ideas from your own works or from some other composer's work was considered very cool and a clever trick, as long as you used them in some new interesting way. If the other composers were still living, they were very happy about this because it proved you had created something worth copying!

The idea that you are expected to make "completely original music" is quite new, and whole idea of plagiarism is new as well in music circles. For example, I skip the whole Coldplay's Viva la Vida vs. Joe Satriani's If I Could Fly issue just with "cool reuse of a theme, go on boys", certainly not "oh crap now I can't support Coldplay because they are copycats".

BTW, it's kind of interesting that modern pop music is more OK with direct sampling of songs than copying ideas. I'm fine with both, just saying the ideas should be free to use as well.

I want music that sounds just like this

[PGGreens]

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.

This just in....

[Joce640k]

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.

Re:This just in....

[Hognoxious]

Program: Find and destroy all copies of yourself, then destroy yourself.

That was close!

Re:This just in....

[Yvan256]

There is another system

Re:So what...

[Etrias]

Plagiarized is really not the right word here. There was a time where composers actively used themes from other composers and composed variations around it. Doing so was often a great compliment to the initial composer. Times change, huh?

Mozart??

[redGiraffe]

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?

He put 5000 pieces of Bach chorales by Emmy

[unity100]

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

Re: Left & Right Brain etc

[TaoPhoenix]

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.

Sounds great...

[mangst]

...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.

Cope's Genius was to define the vocabulary

[rclandrum]

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.