
Triumph of the Cyborg Composer - lief79
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/
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kaitnieks
This kind of AI composer would be just perfect for games, especially indy
games. Most indy game developers can't afford good original soundtracks and if
there was a service that provided them for cheap...

That's an idea for a stratup.

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nuba
Indeed. Cope's musical grammar would be a great place to start hacking around.
This reminds also of the iMUSE (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMUSE>) from the
SCUMM game engine, which would improvise soundtrack transitions based on
motifs and in-game events.

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EAMiller
I'm fascinated by this. It's interesting that in that context the
creativity/passion/humanity of somebody like David Cope doesn't count. If he's
writing software then it's just cold, heartless automation.

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dejb
> it's just cold, heartless automation

An alternative view would be that he has captured part of the 'warm,
emotional' essence of a few of the algorithms that are at work in musician's
brains when they compose music is making them available to the world. Instead
of just delivery a 'golden egg' he is trying to create the goose itself. To me
that is a far more spectacular act of creativity/passion (no I don't see
'humanity' as being synonymous with these). It is probably worth noting the
the silicon chip he runs the algorithm on probably operates at higher than the
temperature of a human brain so perhaps 'warm, electronic automation' would be
a better description.

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EAMiller
To be clear, my comment was made in surprise that that his creativity/passion
goes unappreciated - I agree it's an amazing accomplishment.

In general though I think the binary of warm/emotion vs. cold/heartless is
kind of useless. As in his quote : "I can understand why it’s an issue if
you’ve got an extremely romanticized view of what art is" Art is amazing stuff
people make, be it software or music.

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paulgerhardt
It would be interesting to port Emily Howell to CUDA and copyright the
billions of "promising" songs generated; thereby establishing something of
copyright infringement troll corporation.

(Strictly as a thought experiment, of course, more in an attempt fix copyright
than to break it.)

On the one hand, the function space is unfathomably huge; on the other, the
"stereotypical" punk song is written using various permutations of only 3
chords.

Really it makes me question how to reconcile the difference between
"discovering" and "creating" music. It would appear one can do both. Though
can one imbue discovery with emotion as one can creation?

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evanrmurphy
If we consider time of composition as a variable though, then the function
space is even unfathomably huger.

What I mean is that even if those 3 chords have been played countless times in
the past, right now may be the time to hear them again: _when_ to play is an
artistic choice as much as _what_ to play is, because art relates not just
with itself as a static object but also with the world around it.

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evanrmurphy
This seems so significant for music as artifact, but less so for music as
communication. Analogy: even if you get an AI to generate emails in the style
of my friend, it still won't convey any content my friend wants to express.
(Provides great insights into their writing style though.)

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Groxx
And what if your friend puts content they want to express as input for the AI?
Did the content disappear simply because it's gone through a computer?

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evanrmurphy
Now we're talking! :) I think the content is preserved in this case, but you
see it still requires my authentic friend to generate it. (Unless we build
deeper maybe...)

