Triumph of the Cyborg Composer — David Cope and “Emily Howell”
For those who are interested, there is a long article at MillerMcCune.com on David Cope, the UC Santa Cruz professor emeritus who has a history of creating AIs that compose music. His latest creation, dubbed Emily Howell, is ready to be unveiled soon, and the article includes a couple samples of "her" work. Here's an excerpt from the article:
Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. 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.
This month, he is scheduled to unveil the results of a successor effort that’s already generating the controversy and high expectations that Emmy once drew. Dubbed “Emily Howell,†the daughter program aims to do what many said Emmy couldn’t: create original, modern music. Its compositions are innovative, unique and — according to some in the small community of listeners who’ve heard them performed live — superb.
Cool, huh?
March 5th, 2010 - 20:48
Really cool. In fact, it’s a kind of musical Turing test.
March 6th, 2010 - 03:02
Uh oh. I’ve been pwned by code.
I find many “musicians” much less talented than this code, which, of course is an extension of a talented person, not something that grew by itself. It seems that in the end math may end up rocking harder than any rocker. The (yet another) ultimate revenge of the nerd!
March 6th, 2010 - 04:59
This will get a lot of peaple(the majority probably) very angry on machines, and very likely will atrack big interest from the crowd,
music is a very sensible point of our ‘humanity’.
March 6th, 2010 - 07:30
Insofar as this represents a technology that makes the products of a certain grade of composition cheaper and, therefore, more available to non-composers, it represents a means by which musical expression is facilitated and augmented, not diminished.
March 6th, 2010 - 07:48
Just another mile marker on the road of “humans are not that fucking special.” It’s as if the universe is saying “get over yourselves.”
March 7th, 2010 - 00:25
This is a prime example of how artificial intelligence – or call it just a human-preferred-complexity-producing algorithm – when approaching human level, far exceeds it in some ways due to its nature even as it fails to come close in many ways.
For humans to find its output more agreeable it seems to need more constraints. For wide popularity it’s currently too progressive, art for its own sake, music for musicians only kind of stuff. Humans harvesting its output can perform the required dumbing down, add human palatable structure and add and modify melodies.
We’re likely to get music of increased – even historically unparalleled – complexity, power, and beauty once new generations of musicians grow up with these new tools. Compare this to the availability of software for graphics artists – the scene has never been the same. This is the next, logical, inevitable step in the evolution of music.
March 7th, 2010 - 18:42
So, could he set Emily Howell up to run continuously, producing infinite symphonies?
March 8th, 2010 - 08:57
And with virtual vocalists, Emily could have singing without real live persons doing it!
Here’s an example of a virtual vocalist product:
http://www.zero-g.co.uk/index.cfm?articleid=802
http://www.zero-g.co.uk/media/mp3/LEON_Demo_Check_It_Out.mp3
(BTW, I have never used it. I just provide it as an example, not as an advertisement.)
March 8th, 2010 - 21:10
“Everything we create is just a product of recombination.”
Well, someone had to be the first one to write it. How did HE do it? Clearly there is something else going on that Cope’s recombination machine doesn’t capture.
March 16th, 2010 - 09:47
That’s not suprising. Whatever humans can do, machines can do at least as good as humans. The only problem is that this doesn’t change much. Music is composed not only for the joy of listening, but also for the joy of creation. The way it is created can change, but human presence in that process will be always needed for it to make sense.
March 17th, 2010 - 09:10
Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. I’m not much of a classical music aficionado but I certainly enjoyed those pieces.
The bigotry, and I can think of no other world, by some of the detractors is horrible but not all together unsurprising. It will take time for people to realize that this doesn’t cheapen human life but enhances it.