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!