www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/tr...yborg-composer-8507/

I'd love to hear some of your reactions to this fascinating article. (You don't have to read the whole thing or anything, but it is fascinating.)

If it still needed proving to anyone, the following snippet is a good demonstration of the power of expectations on our enjoyment of music:
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.”

It doesn't seem like it would be hard to fill in the missing piece and create artificial mystique for our artificial players, too (provided you don't let people in on its artificiality). You would just generate a life story for the virtual composer. Maybe you could even set it to tailor certain stylistic elements of the music to the life story, name individual pieces in ways that are significant to the life story ("Für X, where X is a person of significance"), and so on. For every element you could name that makes human compositions seem 'more special' than computer compositions, a solution could be devised to mimic it (although, fair enough, some of those solutions would tend increasingly toward requiring us to have developed real AI, which sort of raises all these issues in a still bigger way and then some).

It probably wouldn't be hard to create artificial Master Performers, either, by statistically analyzing the patterns of accents, timing, etc., among critically lauded performers.

Maybe you could analyze current musical trends and automatically generate the next avant garde too.

What actually excites me about all this is the new possibilities created, like the thought of being able to collaborate with and learn from programs like his Emily Howell, or listen to streams of procedurally generated music that are tailored to my tastes. Of course, the creator (possibly out of an attraction to controversy) considers his program an exciting new opportunity already, as he even goes out and states in the article that computers are naturally better composers than humans because they aggregate musical experience just as we do, but more effectively, and they're free of our silly misconceptions and biases.

How do you feel about this all? What are we to do when the power of statistics tramples treasured myths underfoot?

Maybe Emmy is David Cope! -it is tempting to reason that; the programmer (David Cope) is the only person that tought everything he knows about music to Emmy, and Emmy cannot know any more than David Cope had known. -an AI is basically an automated decision maker. Decision made by this AI is predetermined by the programmer, David Cope. Any randomness added to this decision is considered as error. (so, does error constitute as creativity? is Bach and Mozart 'believe' they're in error? or is it a conscious decision to be in error? how do AI make conscious decision to be in error?)

I think it is just David Cope.
- any compliment to the music should be given to David Cope, not Emmy.

www.codeorgan.com/

try this. what do you think?

Heh. It's cute how it uses the page's code to determine the content of the music, but it doesn't really seem like a meaningful translation. (Maybe the way it chooses a key, but the other stuff not so much.) It's more like, "Here's a random music generator, now you supply the random parameters for it" than "Here's what this webpage 'sounds like'".

Msafwan -- In some sense Emmy/Emily is just an extension of what Cope has done, but he uses her computational power to do things he couldn't do. If I understand correctly, the program is designed to extrapolate what the 'rules' of writing a Bach piece (or whatever) are just by being shown a whole lot of Bach's music. Cope doesn't do that extrapolation, doesn't find out the rules himself, and he doesn't write the pieces that apply them -- he's pretty far removed from the actual writing of the music. At that point, it would almost be a bit like saying his parents are responsible for whatever he's done, wouldn't it?

I love thinking of people as "beautiful machines". I do believe that computers can be creative. Music is enjoyable when it is predictable in some ways and unexpected in others. If it gets too predictable (if we listen to it too much) it gets boring. If it is too unpredictable, then we can't comprehend it. Jokes are enjoyable for the same reason.

Yes - I believe creativity has a certain element of randomness. Edward De' bono (the guy who invented the term "lateral thinking" thinks this too.

When computer databases and processing speed start to become closer in size and speed to that of the human brain, I think we will see more and more examples of machines acting creatively.

Yeah - expectation massively influences everything, which is why blind testing is so important in any kind of scientific testing.