21–26 of 26 posts
I 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.
Look, 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 au…
Edit: (It was to long) I think the program is fairly close to the human creative process. While it probably produces a lot of junk so do we. I would consider it a success when presented with a few good ideas out of the countless possibilities. Saying it lacks good taste is different than saying it's not creative.
Look, 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 au…
I disagree, but I still up voted you. Edit: (It was to long) I think the program is fairly close to the human creative process. While it probably produces a lot of junk so do we. I would consider it a success when presented with a few good ideas out of the countless possibilities. Saying it lacks good taste is different than saying it's not creative.
Look, 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 au…
I disagree, but I still up voted you. Edit: (It was to long) I think the program is fairly close to the human creative process. While it probably produces a lot of junk so do we. I would consider it a success when presented with a few good ideas out of the countless possibilities. Saying it lacks good taste is different than saying it's not creative.
I think my point would be illustrated by this experiment, similar to his original experiment. Take a piece by Chopin, and a piece by a contemporaneous unknown composer. No doubt to the amateur, they would sound like they could have been written by the same person. Add in the piece by EMI and an amateur would not be able to tell which one was which. The reality is that in order to really understand great music, you need to know a lot more than Hofstadter does. I am confident that I could play him 10 pieces written in Poland in 1835 and he would think they were all by Chopin, even if all of them were utter crap.
The 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
I haven't listened to any of them yet, but I am surprised by how few there are. There's only one Chopin-like piece, for instance. This causes me to worry: how many bad Chopin-like pieces did this thing spit out before coming up with a passable one? If there's still a human intelligence sitting there and sorting the good compositions from the bad ones, the program is significantly less impressive.