X-Message-Number: 8481
Date: Wed, 20 Aug 1997 11:36:31 +0100
From: John de Rivaz <>
Subject: Re: Computers and games

In article: <>  
writes:
> From: John K Clark <>
> Subject: Computers and games
> Last week a computer beat Takeshi Murakami, the world 
> Othello champion, 6 games in a row. 
> Any bets on how long Go will hold out?

The composition of music is another area where computers are catching up. 
This item is about how a computer program can enable dead composers to 
"write" new works.

An article in New Scientist of 9 August 1997 describes the use of computers 
to compose in the style of specified composers, and specifically the such a 
program by David Cope. The program does not produce an excellent result 
every time, but symphonies have been written that are perfectly acceptable 
even if they are not the greatest works of the composer concerned. Certainly 
the computer program, available free on the Internet, can write music better 
than most humans. <http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/home>. Unfortunately 
the program is written for the Macintosh, but I do not expect it will be 
that long before it is compiled for the PC.

At present a human is still required to delete unworthy compositions by the 
system, but as with chess playing programs, the quality will undoubtedly 
improve with time.

Of course, music composition is only one "output" of a human. Maybe humans 
work on the basis of random noise plus stimuli go though a neural net and 
give the output. It seems that if we could record every sensory input to a 
human and every reaction or output, we could then create the neural net that 
converts one to the other. Music is possibly an interesting subset with 
which to test this hypothesis, although prose or possibly speech could also 
be tried. [The program in the New Scientist article is not an adaptive 
network as far as I know, it works by an ordinary sequence of instructions 
looking for patterns in the samples of music supplied by the user.]

The program is worrying to some people who think that music is some sort of 
sublime human achievement resulting from "character forming" influences. A 
computer program has "no model of life experiences, no sense of itself, has 
never heard a note of music and has no trace in it of where I think music 
comes from" says Douglas Hofstadter a cognitive scientist at Indiana 
University. The fact that a computer running on an ordinary Macintosh 
computer can produce high quality music is attracting a lot of attention 
from people involved in artificial intelligence. However this may have 
missed the fact that the program does require samples of a composer in order 
to work. However Cope has experimented with getting his program to compose 
its own music. He uses a method of evolution. He deliberately selects 
outputs that would normally be discarded as being uncharacteristic of a dead 
composer and then feeds them in as input. A few cycles of this produces an 
individual style.

The program has churned out more music for its creator than any single 
person could listen to within a natural lifetime. And as copies are being 
given away free on the Internet the amount of music that must be being 
produced worldwide is obviously a lot more than this. It would seem that 
there is no longer any need to employ someone to write or even perform music 
for films or commercials. But I would suspect that there will always be 
people who have a need for "the real thing" and therefore patronage for 
human composers and performers.

-- 
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John de Rivaz  *           Fractal Report              *
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               *       Music I like - see homepage     *
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