I understand your pity... However I still think the the words "I'll be Bach" should appear somewhere in this article.
They say that all the time on those classical radio stations that play nothing but bach-to-bach Bach...
Sounds Like Bach
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Re: Sounds Like Bach
#12From a pragmatic point of view, it would be really neat if I could input the songs in my Instrumental Hard Rock Radio on Pandora.com (http://pandora.com/stations/30edcc89cca783c32f86a5cddf5ee0c7...) into the EMI program mentioned, then vote on the resulting songs.
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#13Does anyone know the date this was written?
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#14Amen Mr Hofstadter. And it forces us to think: the universe is so orderly that even deep feeling can be reproduced mathematically! How can we then say that the universe was not designed? There is so much order, so many patterns! When we see this in Apple products, we marvel at Apple's mastery of design. But when we see even greater level of attention to detail in nature, we say it just happened...
As a lover of good music, such as classical and soundtrack music, and traditional Christian hymns, it is troubling. but I say this: No matter how great this program gets, it will NEVER, ever be able to communicate the intricacy of feeling that the human soul produces. It will always be a mechanical analysis of what has already been created - NOT true creation.
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#15Look, Hofstadter is an amateur. He is obviously a music lover, but he's not a music expert by any stretch. This was plainly obvious when he came to my university and gave his little talk.
He assumed that because his talk was at the music school's concert hall, his audience must be comprised of music students and faculty, without actually ever checking if that were the case. Those of us from the music school in the audience were all very aware that the majority of the audience were students from mathematics, physics, computer science, etc. Most music students don't know who Hofstadter is, and don't care.
So when he jumps to his conclusion that he "fooled" 1/3 of the audience with his recording, it's way way off base. After the talk, we all (music faculty & grad students) went out for a drink with Hofstadter and pointed out the errors in his assumptions, but he refused to listen. His methodology is totally bent, and his conclusions are what he wants to think, not the actual data.
I --and all my fellow musicians-- were pretty much all totally nonplussed by his demonstrations, and underwhelmed indeed by the supposed "quality" of the computer compositions. Don't get me wrong, it's impressive that a computer can do what EMI can do. But it ain't Bach, and it sure ain't Chopin.
Also, do not underestimate the human intereference in the process. A human is involved in "tweaking" EMI and "filtering" its output. EMI probably produces 1000 pieces per minute, 999 of which are total crap, and one of which is vaguely interesting. Run it for a few minutes and you'll have a few vaguely interesting pieces. Pick the best one, and say "the computer composed this, isn't it great?". What about the other N-thousand pieces that were shite?
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#16The EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) Website: http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm
Some of the music generated: http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/mp3page.htm
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#17I 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.
Yeah. That's what I was thinking.
The fact remains that without Chopin, the EMI can't do anything. It can't create, it can only emulate. Rather like a lot of other, lesser composers, for that matter. ;-)
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#18The 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 beau…
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.
This only goes to show that eventually, all fields of knowledge will be nothing except mathematics!
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#19It was new, it was unmistakably "Chopin-like" in spirit, and it did not feel emotionally empty. I was truly shaken. How could emotional music be coming out of a program that had never heard a note, never lived a moment of life, never had any emotions whatsoever?
Most emotions don't come directly from music, they come from a listener's interpretation of it. It's not romantic at all. There's nothing magical about music, it's just an abstract way for people to communicate. Composers might pour their emotion into a piece but if no one understands then people won't think it's emotional. And obviously, as he discovered with EMI, simply knowing the psychological tricks a computer program can generate music that does evoke emotion.
Re: Sounds Like Bach
#20What is art/creativity after all, other than the EMI's basic modus operendi:
1) Chop-up 2) Re-assemble
For example, a unicorn, takes a horn from say, a picture of a longhorn, and sticks that onto a picture of a horse in the mind's eye, and voila, there is a unicorn. Getting bits of information from disparate places and re-assembling them in ways which are harmonious in some sense underlies all art, be it music, or painting, or whatever.
Truth is, in my own opinion anyway, there is no "soul". There is only a complex neural net which can do the above algorithm pretty darn well, or at least, can do it well in the case of artists. Get over it, I say. The earth isn't the center of the universe either. Too bad.