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

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

[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

[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

[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.

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.

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.

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: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. ;)