For musicians and devs, it's a good hint that Markov chains are "good enough" for most interesting music applications, ML/AI doesn't typically yield better results. Happy to see this on the front page!
I don't disagree with this observation, but I wanted to mention a counterpoint. Eno's "Music for Airports" famously uses a system of multiple tape loops that produce sequences of different periods. As you listen, you can hear phrases that occur nearly together and then later, well-separated in time, as the periods of these loops go in and out of phase: "One of the notes repeats every 23 1/2 seconds. It is in fact a l…
Q: If I could give you a black box that could do anything, what would you have it do?
A: I would love to have a box onto which I could offload choice making. A thing that makes choices about its outputs, and says to itself, This is a good output, reinforce that, or replay it, or feed it back in. I would love to have this machine stand for me. I could program this box to be my particular taste and interest in things.
Q: Why do you want to do that? You have you.
A: Yes, I have me. But I want to be able to sell systems for making my music as well as selling pieces of music. In the future, you won't buy artists' works; you'll buy software that makes original pieces of "their" works, or that recreates their way of looking at things. You could buy a Shostakovich box, or you could buy a Brahms box. You might want some Shostakovich slow-movement-like music to be generated. So then you use that box. Or you could buy a Brian Eno box. So then I would need to put in this box a device that represents my taste for choosing pieces.