Sounds Like Bach
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Sounds Like Bach
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Re: Sounds Like Bach
#2The Reddit discussion on this is really good:
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7eoth/sounds_li...
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#3[deleted]
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#4I don't understand why he is so morose. I could understand if it had been revealed that Chopin was actually a computer. Being upset about this seems akin to being upset that the world's fastest sprinter can be equaled or bettered by a motor car. Surely what makes the music so great is that it is a product of human ability.
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#5I liked the article, but I think Hofstadter is overrating the philosophical importance of his own subjective experience and emotions here. Just because you had a profound emotional experience listening to human-composed music doesn't mean it's the end of the world or human creativity is ruined if you can get the same feeling from somewhere else. He could probably get the same feelings from the right drugs.
"Spiritual experiences" aren't that rare or objectively profound and Hofstadter would do well not to generalize too much from his own.
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#6I don't understand why he is so morose. I could understand if it had been revealed that Chopin was actually a computer. Being upset about this seems akin to being upset that the world's fastest sprinter can be equaled or bettered by a motor car. Surely what makes the music so great is that it is a product of human ability.
That's what makes the musician great, but it doesn't make the music any better. Usain Bolt is very impressive but I'm not going to rely on him to carry me to the supermarket.
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#7I think he's being a bit too histrionic about EMI here. It produces good music, but it has to be highly "inspired" by a human composer first. Without the works of a genius artist to consume and process, EMI would not be able to produce anything lovely itself. It can only elaborate on a composer's style, not have one of its own. For now, computers still don't have real creativity.
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#8I don't understand why he is so morose. I could understand if it had been revealed that Chopin was actually a computer. Being upset about this seems akin to being upset that the world's fastest sprinter can be equaled or bettered by a motor car. Surely what makes the music so great is that it is a product of human ability.
That's what makes the musician great, but it doesn't make the music any better. Usain Bolt is very impressive but I'm not going to rely on him to carry me to the supermarket.
I agree but personally I view art in the sense that it is an intermediary between the artist and the audience, a symbolic representation of the true value of it: the semantics of the piece and how the artist chose to express themselves and not the physical manifestation itself. In a vacuum I don't think artworks are special. They are after all just noise or shapes and colors.
(Apologies if this sounds very pretentious but I couldn't figure out how to say it any other way :) )
Edit: This view was cemented for me when I read the book 'The Power of Art' by Simon Schama. After I read the book I realised that what made most of the great paintings great was the context in which they were created. The fact that some of them are aesthetically attractive or required consummate skill to create is besides the point. Their value comes from the messages in the paintings. For example there was a time painting divine biblical characters with dirty feet was seen as humanizing them, blasphemy. Something which I would never have noticed about the painting if it hadn't been pointed out. And even then I would not have deduced its significance which was that it supported a deeply subversive movement of religious reform.
That being said, traveling forward 400 years or so. The music of Gordon Sumner, AKA Sting is self professed 'doodling' yet it can probably evoke a stronger emotional response than arguably more significant works.
So I retract my previous position and now I don't know where I am :/
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#9I understand your pity... However I still think the the words "I'll be Bach" should appear somewhere in this article.
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#10The other way to look at it would be to see the beauty in simplicity, and gather hope from it. Why is it so important that the human brain is especially "deep"? Does he imply that all "less deep" things have no dignity?
Personally I have for a long time now been fascinated by the complexity that results from simple computations - all of nature around us is an example of it, and who would claim that nature is not beautiful? As an example, I wonder what the world looks like for the spiders in my cellar. Presumably, the cellar is a whole microcosm that looks incredibly strange and alien, if we were to look at it from the perspective of a spider living there. Lot's of complex computations go on there, without an explicit brain being involved. We humans are completely oblivious to it. I hope some biologists at least have looked into such things, though. But there are so many "small worlds" that I doubt biologists can cover them all.
As for music, I don't think it is a god-given thing. Rather, I think it was a by-product of evolution. Because of the brains ability to draw analogies, sequences of tones invoke associations in the brain. It is only an example of the brilliance of evolution that it managed to use this by product for something useful.
Reading that article made me expect a future in which a musician will not be known for a particular composition, but for the algorithm he devised for creating music of a particular flavor. Could be fun, no?