Smith: [explaining why robots can't have feelings] Could a robot write a Shakespeare, or compose a Beethoven?Not a bad come-back for a robot. And, indeed, I found myself thinking about it a couple of months ago while composing this string quartet for a music class.
Robot: Can you?
Up until I actual took a fairly in-depth course on musical composition, it had always been a kind of sacred mystery to me. Notes followed one another in patterns which instantly let me know what sort of mood was implied, but without giving a clue as to how the composer knew how to arrange them in such a way.
As I found out, composition is not nearly as creative a process as I thought. There are many, many rules governing voice leading, harmony, chords, progressions, and transitions.
Why, then, couldn't we come up with an auto-composition computer program? It would much simpler than the old thousand-monkeys-at-a-thousand typewriters bit, as there are far fewer possible note combinations than words.
The implications about human creativity are not, I think, earth-shattering. After all, doesn't the great artist know when to break the rules?
There is, I believe, a short story on this same topic, in which an old-fashioned lover of classical music teaches his robot servant to play the piano better than any human musician could. However, ultimately the robot refuses to do so, even though being a piano virtuoso is easy for him, saying "But it was not meant to be easy..."
1 comment:
if you want to depress yourself and see an example radio 3 on the bbc held this competition last christmas. i have to admit to being fooled.
It is possible that it is something peculiar to Bach, who I love, that allows computers to imitate it, and maybe some loud rok stuff might be trickier...hope so :-)
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