TeledyN

Emily Howell is already a better (sic) composer than 99 percent of the population. Whether she or any other computer can bridge that last 1 percent, making complete works with lasting significance to music, is anyone's guess.

What Chris fails to mention about David Cope's tone bot is that it is creating 'original' works in other people's styles which is, outside of the world of west coast pop music, the mark of a bad composer, at best, it's kitch. It is one thing to emulate Mozart or Bach indistinguishably as a parlour trick or even to sell records to environments hungry for just one more Hershel number, but it is quite another thing to expand the science of the experience of music and to create new music as innovative and enlightening to today's listener as Mozart and Beethoven had been to the audiences of their day, which is to say, there is no danger here of real composers losing their anthropological tribal roles in our evolution. None whatsoever.

And what that tells us is there is more to creativity than simply rehashing history in fresh packaging: creative work is an exploration into the outer space beyond what we previously believed were the outer limits of what we call 'Music'.

This venturing out is in some ways an unpredictable subset space of the greater Universe of sound; there are many 'correct' sounds that no one likes. In other ways, like when we attempt to bottle Music for resale, it seems almost a superset of sound itself, and clearly both of these unknown realms may on occasion be found algorithmically, but very rarely are they recognized algorithmically as valuable additions to our musical knowledge, yet that pruning of the total space of possible sound is essential to the composer -- even John Cage always sought to control what was to be uncontrolled in his aleatoric works, there is always a figure over the background, even in 4'33" our attention is directed to a conducted event. It might be a amusing to provide 'Emily' with the collected piano works of John Cage; while even the average music program grad has little trouble seeing at least potentials of directions to take out into the outer space from there, I really rather doubt the bot would then proceed to find us new conceptual expressions of lessons in Buddhism.

Kevin Pollard is a little more kind to the idea of Emily, who caught him in a mood of transhuman weakness after a close encounter with 'Cynthia', the first synthetic lifeform, but even Kevin has his doubts about Emily's abilities in the Real World:

I’d be interested to do a session with an on-the-fly version of Emily or her successor where phrases are played in a call-and-response manner in real-time…improvised…and see what happens; how I would respond to the musical directions generated by the computer and how it would react to my response. To accomplish that it would need to interpret what I was playing, understand which harmonic direction and tempo it belonged to, and respond by perhaps including some of the elements but not others, deciding the relevant points and maybe adding its own direction whilst adhering to the pulse, dynamics and the unfolding structure of the shared piece, which is essentially what I do when I improvise.

Indeed.  Marcel Duchamp famously punched a hole in the corner of a math textbook, tied a string through it and then hung the book outside his window for a year, "To see how the axioms and corollaries of Euclid would stand up to the harsh realities of Nature."

Even if 'Emily' really is 'the world's most musically creative computer program' -- like they say of the Dancing Bear, the spectacle is not that the Bear dances so well, but that the Bear dances at all. And maybe Emily really is better at the ancient Art of Fugue than 99% of the average Slate reader, but given usual population distributions, I daresay all of the actual composers are in that remaining 1%.  And, on the plus side, if Emily really can digest a style in the traditional forms and churn endless new emulations 7x24 for the cost of the computer time to run the job, hey, maybe it will free up time for Andrew Webber and Philip Glass and the whole hosts of endless cliché TV and cinema composers can now get back to the real work of that thing we call Music!

The Newton Symphony Orchestra presents a special weekend of events focused on the knowledge that music has the power to transform lives—physically, emotionally, and spiritually.  The Healing Power of Music ~ The Mind/Body/Spirit Connection is a two-day program for all ageS, music-lovers of all genres and those who seek to learn more about the many ways that music has been used for centuries and across cultures to promote healing, respite, and personal fulfillment.

But now I have an esoteric question to ask and forgive me if this is just plain naive: I know of several 'new age' composers who specifically work on various theoretical (perhaps speculative) scientific grounds to produce therapeutic changework musics (eg Jeffrey Thompson and his Schumann Resonance and brainwave entrainment compositions) but I'm drawing a blank finding composers in the acoustic instrument orchestral (or chamber) realm who are attempting to apply scientific principles in their composition.

I know in the classical and jazz realms we have a great many artists who are firmly convinced of a therapeutic value in their work. Sun Ra, Albert Ayler, John Coltrane to name just three, but in these musics (perhaps with the exception of Sun Ra's occult reasons) there is no peer-reviewed published theoretical foundation to their approach, theirs is entirely an empirical thing, folk art, a principle discovered or handed down, not a principle derived and deployed (I may be wrong there, feel free to correct me) and of course Brian Eno had hoped his non-repeating cycles would, as a product of creating nearly endless pieces, influence people to think about the future although I don't find anywhere any psychological foundation for his thinking. Stockhausen too had his own reasons for believing in the power of his works to change listeners, but I'm not certain his reasons had been demonstrated first elsewhere, except perhaps in meditation classes. And, as the NSO wellness event shows, a great many people are applying orchestral music, repurposing existing music of all types for all sorts of clinically very effective music therapy, but what I'm seeking here is music that was designed to be therapy, composed with peer-reviewed reason to believe the composition itself would be directly therapeutic.

Oliveros I believe did explore some sort of theoretical framework for a music-for-therapy although now I cannot find the reference. I'm not saying that any of these musics would have to actually be medicinal, I'm just curious to find examples of musics that were, with good reason, intended to be medicinal. Can anyone point me in any directions toward anything like this?

It's been a long time since I'd encountered software that was useful, let alone find something useful and a joy to use. This past weekend I found it, and while it may be old news to many of you musician readers, it was welcome news to me: it all started on a link to the Linux Edition of a 30 day trial-edition of the $50 $39** (US) Transcribe!

From the Seventh String website:

Transcribe! offers many features aimed at making the transcription job smoother and easier, including the ability to slow down music without changing its pitch, to analyse chords and show you what notes are present, and the apability of adding markers and textual annotations so you can easily navigate around the track. Transcribe! also has a piano keyboard displayed on screen which you can click to play reference notes.

It is important to understand that Transcribe! does not attempt to do the whole job, processing an audio file and outputting musical notation or midi - this would be nice, but is a currently unsolved research problem. The spectrum analysis feature is very useful for working out those hard-to-hear chords, but you must still use your ear and brain to decide which of the peaks in the spectrum are notes being played, which are merely harmonics, and which are just the result of noise and broad-spectrum instruments such as drums. If you have never worked out even a simple piece of music by ear then Transcribe! will probably not help you, but if you do sometimes work out recorded music by ear then Transcribe! can make the job a lot quicker and easier.

Useful, designed for the purpose and upfront with realistic expectations? The demo is free and, so far as I could tell with a day's play, it is solid and un-crippled. For the curious there is a Linux GTK demo and for completeness also an edition for Mac OS/X and the requisite Microsoft Windows version; check it out. Screenshots suggest the program is pretty much identical across platforms although only the Windows and OS/X editions permit deconstructing soundtracks directly off videos (Linux users can peel the sound out with mencoder).

And it's all true. Well, so far as I could tell. I loaded it up with a test file, a transcription I've been putting off for years just because I know how tedious it would be to step through using Audacity (which is a very good program, but ...) I selected the mp3, and there it was, the waveform, the fourier plot with peaks dropped to keyboard, and a side window taking a best guess at the harmonic structure of this particular moment in the file. I swiped across a phrase, a single orchestral chord, played it back at 35% speed, set the A-B repeat (very useful also for practicing difficult passages, or for learning foreign languages or transcribing voice!) and then tested my best-perception guesses of the detected tones by poking the keyboard sine-tones. Now this is software that works with me!

I didn't read no manuals. I didn't need no stinkin' manuals. Ok, I probably will later, but it was Sunday afternoon, the kids were busy, the house was quiet and this was just plain fun. Too much fun. And then ... what's this? It says 'EQ'. Ok. But it isn't just any EQ, it is an EQ with presets, and with intelligent domain-appropriate presets! So nice. Want to know what's groovin' in the bass lines? click Ok, what's all that high-end horn piccolo stuff? click Give me that tenor line. click -- it's like karaoke mode for a jazz ensemble! Let me see those famous 'corrected' harmonies Sonny put into the Fletch charts, yeah, that's the one, now ZOOM it up, slow it down ...

It's like having a microscope for music

I only really touched the surface of this thing, and I still have to work out how I'd work-flow from the analysis screen to actually putting notes on paper (I may use paper and pencil for the first sketch, then clean it up in Rosegarden later) but from just this afternoon's session already I know what I want for my birthday this year! The price is more than fair, it works out to be about $54** CDN, and unlike a lot of proprietary Linux cross-port software, this one is intelligently packaged, done by someone who took the time and care to do it right. Even the help pages are useful!

Finally, a disclosure that really doesn't change much: knowing how transcribing tunes and arrangements is largely a thankless task done by musicians and copyists who are not the best paid to begin with, Seventh String offers a very generous Affiliate Program, its how they spread the word directly from one musician to another; I was all set to post this review yesterday and with no less enthusiasm (the kids can attest to how much fun I was having) and I would have posted then except that I found the affiliate details and thought hey, who knows, maybe one or two of my musician readers here wouldn't mind helping pay down the cost of my copy at no extra cost to themselves and score a pretty nifty piece of pro-gear software in the process. I'll likely just spend the money on music anyway, so it's still all in the family :)

So here it is, the commercial message: to pick up a copy, or for more information, the 30-day demo downloads, screenshots, transcription methodology tips here are the product pages:

• Transcribe! for Linux
• Transcribe! for OS/X
• Transcribe! for Windows

most of us in the arts have a completely wrong-headed idea of our true mission. Jim Collins argues that we mistakenly assume our mission is to present our particular and beloved artistic canon, the greatest artworks, old and new. He suggests our core values are exactly not that, that our favorite artworks are the means by which we have try to fulfill the core values of art, and according to his research, that is exactly where we must experiment. To rediscover our purpose, to live long and prosper, we must let go of our focus on programming favorite artworks, old and new, and instead boldly experiment with engaging people in artistic experiences. We must reconnect with the human art instinct.

The arts have been around since at least Day Two of human history (ornamental jewelry goes back 80,000 years, painting almost as far—and that’s not mentioning our impulses to create dance, music and to tell stories, which undoubtedly are even more ancient). Artistic expression is not just the province of artists; it appears spontaneously, irrepressibly, throughout each of our lives, mostly in forms and venues not identified with Art with a capital A. So, how have we let the identity of art get quarantined as an occasional pricey event in a special building?

Art appears in every endeavor raised to its highest level of expression, and more commonly in our conversations, hobbies, homes, as we dance at parties … anywhere people slip into the work and play of art. The core value for those of us in the arts professions—engaging people in the richness of the artistic experience—is to prompt that universal sense of meaning, richness, “specialness,” and satisfaction. It feels good—really good—the kind of good feeling that is hard to find in our overstimulated, materialistic, multitasking lives.

In order to unify our disparate arts, we need to find the quintessential elements of that human experience. We need to identify the fundamental particle or particles at the basis of the attraction, a Higgs boson for the human movement toward the artistic experience. And if we can agree around that unifying principle, I believe we can begin to answer the Jim Collins challenge in a powerful way, by experimenting boldly to bring people into the common, universal, highly-valued human experience of art. Not just those who already value the arts, but also those who aren’t in the club and don’t think about or care about the arts, yet yearn for fullness in their lives. We need to move the experience of art to the center of our intention, and reclaim Homo sapiens’ cultural birthright of artistic engagement.

Precisely. I refer to this all the time as the "Sacred duty" of the performance, be that as a theatre group, as musicians or as a painter, I ask if the performers were aware of their sacred duty to deliver the message.

And I don't mean the story line or the author's politics.

"No wonder the arts have sustained since the beginning of human history—this is the list of the best parts of being alive. They provide unity, attraction, and the reason there is something to being a human instead of being nothing.

"What can we do, as believers in the power of the fundamental act of creation, to align our actions, our creations, our organizations, our intentions and interactions with everyone inside and outside the arts to maximize that power? How can we create environments that effectively, irresistibly support and nurture that power? What events can we devise that are dedicated to that power, not merely to the presentation of artworks that we hope will contain it for those few who pay to attend?"

The answers, say Eric, are in the Unknown, in new collaborations, new artistic environments, new dialogs, in bold and brilliant new ways of retelling old stories. Which is to say, the answers, say Eric, are in the practice of Art.