
Sounds Like Bach - marcus
http://www.unc.edu/~mumukshu/gandhi/gandhi/hofstadter.htm
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jonnyrotten
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
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?

~~~
Retric
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.

~~~
jonnyrotten
Thanks for the up-vote. My point is that it's easy to fool an amateur. But
classical music, which is what Hofstadter _thinks_ he understands/knows, is
often beyond the realm of the amateur. It's not that an amateur can't love
classical music, but to understand _why_ a piece of music is great when
another similar one _isn't_ is often a rather complicated question.

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.

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Tichy
The 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 beautiful? As an example, I wonder
what the world looks like for the spiders in my cellar. Presumably, the cellar
is a whole microcosm that looks incredibly strange and alien, if we were to
look at it from the perspective of a spider living there. Lot's of complex
computations go on there, without an explicit brain being involved. We humans
are completely oblivious to it. I hope some biologists at least have looked
into such things, though. But there are so many "small worlds" that I doubt
biologists can cover them all.

As for music, I don't think it is a god-given thing. Rather, I think it was a
by-product of evolution. Because of the brains ability to draw analogies,
sequences of tones invoke associations in the brain. It is only an example of
the brilliance of evolution that it managed to use this by product for
something useful.

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. Could be fun, no?

~~~
technoguyrob
_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!

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zasz
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.

~~~
unalone
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. ;-)

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ShardPhoenix
I liked the article, but I think Hofstadter is overrating the philosophical
importance of his own subjective experience and emotions here. Just because
you had a profound emotional experience listening to human-composed music
doesn't mean it's the end of the world or human creativity is ruined if you
can get the same feeling from somewhere else. He could probably get the same
feelings from the right drugs.

"Spiritual experiences" aren't that rare or objectively profound and
Hofstadter would do well not to generalize too much from his own.

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technoguyrob
The Reddit discussion on this is really good:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7eoth/sounds_li...](http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7eoth/sounds_like_bach/)

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dangoldin
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>

~~~
hugh
Ahh, thanks for that.

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.

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jsmcgd
I don't understand why he is so morose. I could understand if it had been
revealed that Chopin was actually a computer. Being upset about this seems
akin to being upset that the world's fastest sprinter can be equaled or
bettered by a motor car. Surely what makes the music so great is that it is a
product of human ability.

~~~
ShardPhoenix
That's what makes the _musician_ great, but it doesn't make the _music_ any
better. Usain Bolt is very impressive but I'm not going to rely on him to
carry me to the supermarket.

~~~
jsmcgd
I agree but personally I view art in the sense that it is an intermediary
between the artist and the audience, a symbolic representation of the true
value of it: the semantics of the piece and how the artist chose to express
themselves and not the physical manifestation itself. In a vacuum I don't
think artworks are special. They are after all just noise or shapes and
colors.

(Apologies if this sounds very pretentious but I couldn't figure out how to
say it any other way :) )

Edit: This view was cemented for me when I read the book 'The Power of Art' by
Simon Schama. After I read the book I realised that what made most of the
great paintings great was the context in which they were created. The fact
that some of them are aesthetically attractive or required consummate skill to
create is besides the point. Their value comes from the messages in the
paintings. For example there was a time painting divine biblical characters
with dirty feet was seen as humanizing them, blasphemy. Something which I
would never have noticed about the painting if it hadn't been pointed out. And
even then I would not have deduced its significance which was that it
supported a deeply subversive movement of religious reform.

That being said, traveling forward 400 years or so. The music of Gordon
Sumner, AKA Sting is self professed 'doodling' yet it can probably evoke a
stronger emotional response than arguably more significant works.

So I retract my previous position and now I don't know where I am :/

------
oz
Amen 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.

------
Goladus
_It 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.

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ruricolist
My question would be: how deterministic is this algorithm? On a large corpus
the program outputs something in the "style" of the composer. (This happens to
human composers too, sometimes: late in life they start turning out self-
parodies.) But given a single piece, can the EMI algorithms (without
jiggering) produce the same piece, or a piece indistinguishable from it?
Unless it could do that, I don't see in what way it replaces or replicates the
composer.

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ph0rque
From 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...](http://pandora.com/stations/30edcc89cca783c32f86a5cddf5ee0c72024179d9bdf3892))
into the EMI program mentioned, then vote on the resulting songs.

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dejb
I understand your pity... However I still think the the words "I'll be Bach"
should appear somewhere in this article.

~~~
tjr
They say that all the time on those classical radio stations that play nothing
but bach-to-bach Bach...

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te_platt
Does anyone know the date this was written?

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Allocator2008
What 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.

