
Computer program writing great, original works of classical music - aho
http://www.slate.com/id/2254232/
======
jacquesm
Halfway down are two little 'click to play' boxes that claim to be Bach like.
I'm no virtuoso, but I can play the piano a little bit and that stuff sounds
so mechanistic to me it's not even funny. The first impression you get is of a
very bad player piano roll (the caption says the 'tinny' sound is because of
the MIDI, but that's not what I'm getting at, it's the totally 'dead'
delivery, like a corpse playing the piano). And that's just the first bit, the
compositions are absolutely boring, even the simplest piece from 'das
Notenbuchlein' blows this away.

Glenn Gould and Dinu Lipatti are turning over in their respective graves, Bach
himself is positively spinning.

If 'most people' really can't tell the difference between that music and the
real thing it is sad.

I don't doubt that in the future we'll reach a point where computers will
compose music on par with human composers but these two samples leave me
underwhelmed. I think the proper thing to do here is to appreciate the fact
that the pig can dance at all but to my ears it is just painful.

~~~
pohl
I play the piano in general, and have played some Bach in particular, and I'm
a bit confused by your reaction.

Are you referring to the two tracks on the bottom of the first page? If so, I
don't see text that claims that they are Bach-like. The paragraph that follows
those two tracks mentions Bach-like compositions, but the click-to-play boxes
corresponding to that text are on the second page.

In particular, the two click-to-play tracks on the second page called "Fugue"
are the two supposedly Bach-like tracks.

If, instead, you were referring to those two tracks, I'm wondering: do you
have much experience with Bach's fugues in particular? When you strip away the
interpretation that a live performer brings to Bach fugues, what is left is
indeed very mechanistic, because the construction of the composition is
largely based on starting with a theme, transforming it under various rules,
and playing those transformations against each other. With interpretation they
can be sublime. Rendering a satisfying interpretation of Contrapunctus I is
among the most joyful experiences I've ever had at the keyboard.

But not all of Bach's fugues reach such great heights. There are 24 of them in
each of Well-Tempered Clavier Books I & II — and there are some more mundane
fugues within that are closer to the two fugues on page 2 in terms of
compositional brilliance.

~~~
jacquesm
> I play the piano in general, and have played some Bach in particular,

Neat, colour me positively jealous, the only piece I can play (by Bach) is the
first of the WTK and the opening bars of partita I (which I'm insanely proud
of, it took me a very long time to get that right, but as soon as the left
hand starts to carry the melody I'm totally lost).

So, I'm not a pianist by any definition, just to get that cleared up :)

> Are you referring to the two tracks on the bottom of the first page?

On that page it says:

"Cope has been writing software to help him compose music for 30 years, and he
long ago reached the point where most people can't tell the difference between
real Bach and the Bach-like compositions his computer can produce."

So I took those two - and the rest - to be samples of what it is to be 'Bach
like', and while I can see some similarities (at least, more than with other
composers, for those first two and the fugues) the pieces are terribly simple.

I know about the fugue rules, for instance, one way to condense the score was
to give just one or two voices and let the player figure out what the other
ones should be since the transformation is an entirely logical one (I hope I
understood that correct), not that I could do it, but I think I get the
principle, it is somewhat analogous to the development of a mathematical
series.

The more mundane of the fugues, while not on par with some of the more
spirited ones, in my opinion can compete easily with the samples of the two
fugues on the second page, they are as I tried to put down elsewhere (but
probably failed) to me like thin variations, and then poorly executed.

I'm a bad judge of 'compositional brilliance', but I think that when Bach
wrote his fugues he tried to express some idea, it has a feeling of 'going
somewhere' and this stuff could probably be stretched endlessly without going
anywhere, it sounds like phrases ripped from a book at random strung together.
Does that make any sense to you?

That doesn't mean that it isn't an impressive feat of programming though, and
if he keeps at it there is a good chance that within a few years it will be at
a level where it can truly compete. But it does not give me that feeling just
yet.

I can't play worth shit, but I've listened to music since before I could talk,
my dad was totally fanatical about classical music, it took me until I was 13
or so before I heard my first popular music (and I never stopped listening to
that either), there is something very impressive about this music in sense
that it just 'could be' composed by a person, but that - at least, we have the
say-so of the artist - it was composed entirely by machine and that it becomes
hard to tell the difference.

But just like a chess computer, it looks like intelligence is behind it and is
making the decisions, but in the end it was just 'brute force', so I would not
expect this software to suddenly come up with a new style or an undiscovered
branch of music.

And that's where the real genius in composition lies.

Again, I'm totally jealous of your skills, not because I don't realize that
you must have pumped thousands of hours in to learning to play like that, but
simply because if I had not fallen in love with programming I would have stuck
to music.

~~~
pohl
_On that page it says:..._

That makes sense now. I saw that text, but thought it was too far from those
two files to indicate any connection.

 _if I had not fallen in love with programming I would have stuck to music._

I hear ya. There's a definite connection between programming & music (and/or
mathematics and music) isn't there? I wish I had more time for music. I
haven't touched it for half a decade now, and I'd really have to work to get
even some of it back.

I haven't yet decided what I think of this Emily Howell thing. I think I'd
like to hear an entire composition interpreted by a real player. These
snippets don't really give enough of a dramatic arc so it doesn't seem like a
fair way to compare them. To me a lot of the real Bach fugues don't really
come together until the last few bars, and I wonder if any of these real
pieces would be the same way.

------
anon-e-moose
No it isn't. What an absolutely ridiculous claim. The two "Bach-like" pieces
are rubbish, full of strange discontinuities and random meanderings, not to
mention the rhythm just hammering away in a very set pattern. Reminds me of
terrible beginning piano workbook pieces, only less musical.

On the next page, the other "fugue" does bizarre things that I don't think a
human composer would. The beginning is entirely discontinuous, and doesn't
really sound like a beginning. A real fugue isn't just something being played
repeatedly in different intervals.

If that's the best that the program has to offer, then I'm not sure what it's
accomplished. Just because it can combine complicated things doesn't mean its
composed anything, because it doesn't understand the parts. If someone copied
and pasted parts of great books, and then tried to weave the parts together,
would the result be any good? Or even great books by the same author. Maybe
that's a weak analogy though.

I feel sorry for the Slate writer if he can't tell the difference between the
Bach and this noise, he's seriously missing out.

~~~
jacquesm
Ah! Discontinuous, that nails it perfectly. I couldn't find the right word,
but that's exactly the feeling, it breaks up. The best I could come up with
was 'random sentences from a book'.

------
techiferous
"Audiences have been moved to tears by melodies created by algorithms."

This can be read two ways...

~~~
joubert
Plus they don't qualify what audiences!

------
herdrick
This is music sort of like the writing you get from a Markov text generator.
Except much better. Has anyone gotten any good thoughts or ideas from a Markov
text generator? And that illuminates something about music: the patterns
aren't as complex as language.

This is going to cause a giant re-ranking of composers, as those whose music
seems most like computer-generated stuff will seem less impressive now. (That
will be wrong, but it's what people will think anyway.) Interestingly, the
ones who create the noisiest stuff will benefit the most, whereas those whose
compositions are perfectly expressed in the linear notation of sheet music
will lose out. Ramones in, Beethoven down, Rachmaninoff out.

~~~
ebiester
The Ramones and Punk may be the wrong example. Most punk, early or late,
relies on pretty simple structures.

~~~
herdrick
Right, but it's in how it sounds. Hmmm, maybe what I want to say is that the
performer is up and the composer is down.

------
blehn
This technology would be great for amateur filmmakers, especially those who
aren't skilled musicians. Imagine a UI with sliders to create the desired
mood, tempo, emotion, etc. Maybe the result isn't a John Williams score, but
it sounds professional, is easy to produce, and is royalty free.

I suppose the drawback is if the software is easily accessible, and everyone
uses similar databases of sources, the compositions could all start to sound
alike.

~~~
michaelkeenan
And also great for low-budget computer games.

~~~
blehn
Yeah, maybe even better for that.

------
manlon
The MIDI samples were a really poor choice to introduce the program's
compositions, but those snippets do sound a lot like Bach chorales
stylistically, perhaps at the level a competent (if uninspiring) student of
harmony.

The chorales exist online in machine-readable formats at
<http://www.jsbchorales.net/> (a great resource for doing comprehensive
analysis on chorale harmony -- wouldn't doubt if the same data served as input
for the Emmy program).

------
hernan7
Another article on Cope, with a Hofstadter cameo and non-MIDI samples:
[http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-
the-...](http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-
composer-8507/)

------
techiferous
No sense of timing or rhythm. Even an algorithm that adds a random delay to
notes would make it sound more natural. I listened to previews of the album on
iTunes and it sounds like crap.

~~~
pohl
That is the nature of a MIDI rendering. The output of this program is a
composition, not composition-plus-interpretation.

~~~
techiferous
Ah, that makes sense. Did you listen to the album, too?

~~~
pohl
Not yet, but I might set aside some time to do it. I'm impressed with the
snippets, but I have a hunch that I'd be able to tell a generated work from
the real stuff.

------
elblanco
So when can I d/l a GPL music generator so I can generate billions of hours of
music in the background.

