And destroy humanity. With the power of their rocking!
David Cope, a UC Santa Cruz emeritus professor, wrote some software that could compose music in the style of the classical greats–Mozart, Beethoven, Rachmaninov. Emmy, from EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), could actually write (generate, produce, whatever) scores so convincing–even moving–that scholars of classical music couldn’t tell that they were computer-created. In a sense, Emmy had passed a musical version of the Turing Test. Winning praise from fellow computer scientists and a few musicians, Emmy’s music was so good that it attracted far larger condemnation and criticism.
The reason is that Cope’s automated music raised some 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. His colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man”, because he didn’t have a heart. Eventually, he deleted Emmy’s databases (but keeping the original program).
In February, however, Cope unveiled a successor program that’s already generating the same hype and controversy. Named Emily Howell, this version 2.0 has an even loftier goal–create original music, instead of mimicking human composers. According to the small amount who’ve heard “her” music played live, it’s innovative, unique, and even superb.
His work has generated hostility primarily from those who believe creativity is something a machine could never have, arguing that only humans can compose music with “liveliness” and “soul”. There is a strong human tendency to belittle anything that removes the “magic” or “meaning” or “spirituality” from our lives, and Emily Howell challenges that. Here, have a listen.
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.”
Emily Howell isn’t stealing creativity from people, he says. It’s just expressing itself. Cope claims it produced musical ideas he never would have thought about. He’s now convinced that, in many ways, machines can be more creative than people. They’re able to introduce random notions and reassemble old elements in new ways, without any of the hang-ups or preconceptions of humanity.
“We are so damned biased, even those of us who spend all our lives attempting not to be biased. Just the mere fact that when we like the taste of something, we tend to eat it more than we should. We have our physical body telling us things, and we can’t intellectually govern it the way we’d like to,” he says.
In other words, humans are more robotic than machines. “The question,” Cope says, “isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”
Many of his critics have tried to portray this as machines-vs-humans, with machines encroaching on their creativity and livelihood. But the future, as always, is more complicated than that.
Here’s how this cyborg-esque composing technique works: Cope comes up with an idea. For instance, he’ll want to have five voices, each of which alternates singing groups of four notes. Or perhaps he’ll want to write a piece that moves quickly from the bottom of the piano keyboard to the top, and then back down. He’ll rapidly code a program to create a chunk of music that follows those directions.
After working with Emmy and Emily Howell for nearly 30 years and composing for about twice that many, Cope is fast enough to hear something in his head in the bathtub, dry off and get dressed, move to the computer and 10 minutes later have a whole movement of 100 measures ready. It may not be any good, but it’s the fastest way to translate his thoughts into a solid rough draft.
“I listen with creative ears, and I hear the music that I want to hear and say, ‘You know? That’s going to be fabulous,’ or ‘You know … ‘” — he makes a spitting noise — “‘in the toilet.’ And I haven’t lost much, even though I’ve got a whole piece that’s in notation immediately.”
He compares the process to a sculptor who chops raw shapes out of a block of marble before he teases out the details. Using quick-and-dirty programs as an extension of his brain has made him extraordinarily prolific. It’s a process close to what he was hoping for back when he first started working on software to save him from composer’s block.
As complex as Cope’s current method is, he believes it heralds the future of a new kind of musical creation: armies of computers composing (or helping people compose) original scores.
“I think it’s going to happen,” Cope says. “I don’t believe that composers are stupid people. Ultimately, they’re going to use any tool at their disposal to get what they’re after, which is, after all, good music they themselves like to listen to. There will be initial withdrawal, but eventually it’s going to happen — whether we want it to or not.”
Interestingly, Cope doesn’t think his 30-year project has been that successful:
Cope has sold tens of thousands of books, had his works performed in prestigious venues and taught many students who evangelize his ideas around the world. Yet he doesn’t think it adds up to much. All he ever wanted was to write something truly wonderful, and he doesn’t think that’s happened yet. As a composer, Cope laments, he remains a “frustrated loser,” confused by the fact that he burned so much time on a project that stole him away from composing. He still just wants to create that one piece that changes someone’s life — it doesn’t matter whether it’s composed by one of his programs, or in collaboration with a machine, or with pencil on a sheet of paper.
“I want that little boy or girl to have access to my music so they can play it and get the same thrill I got when I was a kid,” he says. “And if that isn’t gonna happen, then I’ve completely failed.”
Full (quite long) article here. Hat-tip to David Willis.
Personal silly quibble, if they wanted to show off how innovative and unique the music created can be, they could have picked a lot better than that. Regarding the guy saying “I knew it was a machine” clearly he’s being an ass, but from my own viewpoint I couldn’t make a claim like that since it was shitty, and most music made is shitty, so there’s no distinguishing it. Beauty is beauty, trash is trash, etc.
NOW, to the actual question at hand of mechanizing the process, as a musician I’m not really against a way of streamlining ideas to paper, since I think that is why the better music of “our time” (metal) burns out so much. It requires enormous energy, and often you have guys who are great, but are creating something different and new, so they are stuggling to get what they want. Beethoven was already genetically predisposed and well trained to easily put his inspiration into reality (even when DEAF), so perhaps this will help. It isn’t like pop, emo jazz punk etc which are just assigned around being LCD digestible or just throw stuff around and print.
I do think the application of electronics is helpful, since it allows access to musical ideas that are physically impossible or too difficult to organize (note speeds, massive layering etc). It opens the doors a bit to what can be done, and it is true that at the end of the day music, as we create and perceive it, is a scientific process. It can always be said that it’s “just” soundwave intensity that tickles our genes a certain way, and can always be replicated. Still, what this program seems to do is just throw together random pieces randomly, and at the end of the day you’re going to have the same problem, if not far worse logistically, you do with you humans, namely, sifting through the shit to get to the good stuff. Jam bands do the same thing, there are just far fewer of them than can be stored on a 200 gbs of harddrive (thank GOD).
Cope didn’t argue against that though, he’s just made an incredibly useful tool, though I don’t know if “block” in any creative sense is something you avoid, its something you have or don’t. In the case of my metal music, it usually lasts for the rest of the band/musician lifetime, and I don’t know if having a computer “think” for you is an answer.
Something else though, that he said in a bit of emotion (the article speculated further and probably put words in his mouth) about humans being more robotic than machines…because of our emotional biases. So…is being a not entirely rational creature a sign of mechanization?
I think what he meant (judging from the example about favorite foods) is that our minds produce habits and biases and typical ways of thinking because of how neural pathways get strengthened. In a sense, because we “just do what’s comfortable” and are largely doing things out of habit–which translates into the same neural pathways being reinforced– we’re more “robotic” than we like to think.
I suppose that could be what he meant.