What did you think? Ignore the name "David Cope" over there. Who do you think wrote it?
"Emily Howell" is the project name given to AI-composer program. It's predecessor was "EMMY" (Experiments on Musical Intelligence), and both were created by composer, scientist, and UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus of music, David Cope. Sadly, I couldn't find any other clips of its compositions, but I've heard some from "EMI" before, and they were pretty good.
I put this here not just because it's pretty damn amazing that a machine can write music (pretty good music, actually), but also to talk about people's response about it.
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/
Here's the main article; it's a great one but also pretty long, so I'll just copypaste some paragraphs of interest.
Some background on Cope:
"Cope sailed through music schooling at Arizona State University and the University of Southern California, and by the mid-1970s, he had settled into a tenured position at Miami University of Ohio’s prestigious music department. His compositions were performed inCarnegie Hall and The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and internationally from Lima, Peru, to Bialystok, Poland."
First reactions to EMMY (or EMI):
"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?
Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the Wizard of Oz character without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.
Something about music that's composed algorithmically, as opposed to inspirationally:
"During the 18th century, Joseph Haydn and others created scores for a musical dice game called Musikalisches Würfelspiel, in which players rolled dice to determine which of 272 measures of music would be played in a certain order. More recently, 1950s-era University of Illinois researchers Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson programmed stylistic parameters into the Illiac computer to create the Illiac Suite, and Greek composer Iannis Xenakis used probability equations. Much of modern popular music is a sort of algorithm, with improvisation (think guitar solos) over the constraints of simple, prescribed chord structures."
Early response:
"[Cope asked] 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."
More recent response, something that pisses me off a bit:
"At one Santa Cruz concert, the program notes neglected to mention that Emily Howell wasn’t a human being, and a chemistry professor and music aficionado in the audience described the performance of a Howell composition as one of the most moving experiences of his musical life. Six months later, when the same professor attended a lecture of Cope’s on Emily Howell and heard the same concert played from a recording, Cope remembers him saying, “You know, that’s pretty music, but I could tell absolutely, immediately that it was computer-composed. There’s no heart or soul or depth to the piece.”
That sentiment — present in many recent articles, blog posts and comments about Emily Howell — frustrates Cope. “Most of what I’ve heard [and read] is the same old crap,” he complains. “It’s all about machines versus humans, and ‘aren’t you taking away the last little thing we have left that we can call unique to human beings — creativity?’ I just find this so laborious and uncreative.” "
Now I'm big on classical, and it's incredibly hard to imagine a machine spitting out works of Chopin, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, etc. I'm honestly not too sure of what I feel about all this AI jazz (heh), but the closed-mindedness that some people show is just infuriating.
Here's some more philo for you to munch on:
"In his view, all music — and, really, any creative pursuit — is largely based on previously created works. Call it standing on the shoulders of giants; call it plagiarism. Everything we create is just a product of recombination.
In Cope’s fascinating hovel of a home office on a Wednesday afternoon, I ask him how exactly he knows that’s true. Just because he built a program that can write music using his model, how can he be so certain that that’s the way man creates?
Cope offers a simple thought experiment: Put aside the idea that humans are spiritually and creatively endowed, because we’ll probably never fully be able to understand that. Just look at the zillions of pieces of music out there.
“Where are they going to come up with sounds that they themselves create without hearing them first?” he asks. “If they’re hearing them for the first time, what’s the author of them? Is it birds, is it airplane sounds?”
Of course, some composers probably have taken dictation from birds. Yet the most likely explanation, Cope believes, is that music comes from other works composers have heard, which they slice and dice subconsciously and piece together in novel ways. How else could a style like classical music last over three or four centuries?
To prove his point, Cope has even reverse-engineered works by famous composers, tracing the tropes, phrases and ideas back to compositions by their forebears.
“Nobody’s original,” Cope says. “We are what we eat, and in music, we are what we hear. What we do is look through history and listen to music. Everybody copies from everybody. The skill is in how large a fragment you choose to copy and how elegantly you can put them together.
I've always had a nagging thought like this floating around somewhere. Books you read influence your writing style; the people you're with influence how you act and speak. How is music any different? I'll admit it, my crappy improv often takes on the tone and style of music I listen to.Hmm. Or were the greats really just plain brilliant? Natural-born, completely inherent talent? Why is it that the great composers were alive around the same time? Did they not influence and help each other to improve? I don't know, but it's worth thinking about.
Finally, here's the funniest Hitz.fm "Gotcha!" ever lol:
http://hitz.blog.hitz.fm/28929
Next post: Munich, Germany.
