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?'"

Re:Bad examples

[dtzWill]

You can find more examples on his site http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm [ucsc.edu] . 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 [ucsc.edu] .

Re:Too much time on their hands

[oldhack]

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

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.

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:A quote

[Anonymous Coward]

Shouldn't it be spelled "sabot"?

Re:Too much time on their hands

[Anonymous Coward]

Because they don't like the truth that is exposed through this revelation:

"Listen up, maggots. You are not special. You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake. You're the same decaying organic matter as everything else."

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 [wikipedia.org] 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. ;)

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 [ucsc.edu] they are downloadable

and here you can check other emmy pieces http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/works2.htm [ucsc.edu]

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.

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.