Music Artificial Intelligence

[Willravel]

Give this a listen. Sounds like Chopin, right? That's what I thought but I couldn't find it in any of my books. It was too perfect to be a pretender.

Turns out it's a set of complex algorithms. A composer, scientist, and UC Santa Cruz professor named David Cope writes computer programs which are capable of analyzing music to create new compositions in the style of the original music.

Here's a Bach Invention. And some Beethoven.

Upon realizing that a computer could create a completely original Chopin piece, I found myself feeling a combination of hope and dread. I'd love to learn new Chopin pieces, and I look forward to hearing more, but at the same time what does that mean for the original, biological Chopin?

I'm putting this in music because I want to hear from musicians and music lovers.

Here's a Joplin rag.

[MexicanOnABike]

wow! this is cool. DO you have any info or article about thesE?!

[Willravel]

All I have is the website the guy made for it, along with his wiki article.

[ratbastid]

He was featured on an episode of Radiolab from last season. Fascinating stuff.

[PulpMind]

Cool! Totally posted this all over, thanks!

[Martian]

I don't think this idea is new, although the particular methodology is original.

Music is based on patterns. If one groks the patterns, one can easily recreate the music.

Chopin, among others, had a set of rules he used to compose with. Some of it derived from the music itself, and some of it from the work of his contemporaries. Some of it he simply made up himself, and that's what makes a Chopin piece different from that of other romantics.

I struggle with my own rules sometimes, but that's neither here nor there.

Originality in music involves taking what has come before and putting it together in new ways. I see no reason why a computer shouldn't be capable of doing that -- indeed, it strikes me that a computer could easily be better at it than a person.