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. -- ***************************************** Sincerely, * Longevity Report * * http://www.longevb.demon.co.uk/lr.htm * John de Rivaz * Fractal Report * * http://www.longevb.demon.co.uk/fr.htm * * Music I like - see homepage * ***************************************** In the information age, sharing can increase world wealth enormously, because giving information does not decrease your information. http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/JohndeR Fast loading, very few slow pictures Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=8481