Commonality.

Creating computer composers ...


Emily Howell has proved effective at mimicking a composer fairly well. The entire project was created when David Cope, struggling to complete an opera commission, designed a program that understood his music idioms, tendencies, and syntax, and then produced new material in his style. He used this basic material as a guideline to complete the opera. After this, Cope began to expand the parameters, inputting works of other composers into Emmy, trying to create a program that would offer something as authentic as the original. The idea itself was not new—Fritz Kreisler performed many "lost" works of the baroque era, only to later reveal that they were of his own pen, and Remo Giazotto used the bombing of Dresden to "uncover" several works "by Albinoni," most famously the Adagio in G Minor. Yet there is a notable difference: while Kreisler and Giazotto were able to pass off the works as originals because of their fame, closer analysis of the works show distinct signs of musical influences other than the supposed original composer. Emmy's output proved to be mediocre examples of the original composer, with no uncharacteristic elements, but also none of the "brilliance." In the section of his website devoted to "Experiments in Musical Intelligence," Cope describes Emmy's process as:

(1) deconstruction (analyze and separate into parts)
(2) signatures (commonality - retain that which signifies style)
(3) compatibility (recombinancy - recombine into new works)

This process created a composite of the functional norms, and by his own admission, the results were rather uninspiring. In "Creative Writers and Daydreaming," Freud described the creative process as "the suspension of rational principles." A computer can create an infinite number of random possibilities, but the concept of suspended rationality has yet to be attainted by a computer. As Cope explains in "Experiments in Musical Intelligence," it was the lack of "errors," or intentional breaking of the rules, that made Emmy's work plastic. As nuanced as the programming can be, the difference between irrational and random (or intentional breaking of the rules for an aesthetic reason versus arbitrary straying because a certain amount of unpredictability is required) is what separates creation from amalgamation.

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