“I can understand why it’s an issue if you’ve got an extremely romanticized view of what art is,” he says. “But Bach peed, and he shat, and he had a lot of kids. We’re all just people.”
– David Cope, UC Santa Cruz, emeritus professor
“To some extent, this match is a defense of the whole human race. Computers play such a huge role in society. They are everywhere. But there is a frontier they must not cross. They must not cross into the area of human creativity. It would threaten the existence of human control in such areas as arts, literature, and music.”
So said Gary Kasparov, chess grandmaster, one year before he lost to Deep Blue, IBM’s chess-playing supercomputer. Meanwhile, a relatively anonymous professor of music in California had created a computer program capable of composing pieces of music in the style of great composers that most people could not differentiate from authentic compositions. The professor, David Cope, named this program Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or “Emmy”. Since then, Cope and his successive programs have been the objects of both celebration and scorn, challenging the world’s perception of what musical creativity entails.
Cope’s argument, and the basis for his software, is that creativity is essentially recombinant: consciously or not, all composers plagiarize their progenitors and contemporaries. What makes his (or Emmy’s) work superior to the stilted and awkward compositions of earlier programs are two fundamental insights into the syntax of music. Rather than rely on the traditional divisions of musical notation, Cope developed an analytic musical syntax that goes into what Douglas Hofstadter (of Gödel, Escher, Bach) terms the “tension-resolution status” of a piece, the two forces that underlie all music. Secondly, though the program composes according to formal rules, it also uses heuristics that allow it to sometimes ‘break’ its own rules in innovative ways.
– Alex Tesar (Source Art & Science Journal)
More stories can be found here.
binary options
Howdy! I could have sworn I’ve visited this site before but after browsing through some of the posts I
realized it’s new to me. Anyways, I’m definitely happy I stumbled upon it and I’ll be book-marking
it and checking back often! binary options
Wow, marvelous blog structure! How long have
you been running a blog for? you make blogging glance easy.
The overall glance of your site is excellent, let alone the content!
Hey! Do you use Twitter? I’d like to follow
you if that would be ok. I’m definitely enjoying your blog and look forward to new posts.
I think this is one of the most significant info for me.
And i’m glad reading your article. But want to remark on few general things,
The site style is wonderful, the articles is really great :
D. Good job, cheers
Its like you read my mind! You appear to know a lot about this, like you wrote the
book in it or something. I think that you
could do with a few pics to drive the message
home a little bit, but other than that, this is excellent blog.
A fantastic read. I’ll definitely be back.
I’m gone to inform my little brother, that
he should also go to see this blog on regular basis to obtain updated from most up-to-date news.
It’s really a great and useful piece of info. I am glad that you simply shared this useful information with us.
Please keep us up to date like this. Thank you for sharing.