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The biggest reason I want this kind of thing to succeed is to see a piece of artificially-generated music pass the "musical Turing test". If you play a piece o

The biggest reason I want this kind of thing to succeed is to see a piece of artificially-generated music pass the "musical Turing test". If you play a piece of generated music for someone, (no matter how good it is), as long as you tell them that an algorithm produced it, you'll always have that guy who tells you "it doesn't have the 'soul' that real music has". So make them prove it. Put them through numerous statistically significant double-blind tests with human-vs-computer generated music. I think at some point in the near future no one will be able to legitimately claim that there's anything "magical" about human-produced art.

pierrec 11y ago
I'm pretty sure David Cope has passed that point already with his algorithmic techniques. However, the kind of formal double-blind that you suggest would be difficult to put together in a way that everyone agrees upon unanimously. It's also a problem that most of his algorithmically created music has never been performed and only exists as poor mock-ups of a performance.
brianclements 11y ago
I've thought a lot about this. It's a very interesting problem to construct a musical Turing test because music is such a relative and personal thing. The "best" works of all time are meaningless to someone with no relationship to the piece, the composer, or the time period. And the spectrum of material is very wide. You can have composers use all kinds of algorithms and methods as "composition tools" [1] to produce works that sound very algorithmic and repetitive to the unfamiliar [2] or seemingly random [3] all the way to the theorized "machine composer" that can also produce seemingly organic music or obviously algorithmic music. Which is more genuine: the algorithmic composition made by a human or the one by a machine/program? What if they use the same algorithmic tools? Before one constructs a musical Turing test of music from machines vs humans, I'd like to see a test first about if people can discern whether algorithmic or formulaic composition techniques were used in a (human composed) piece or whether it was all "organic" (I don't even know how to define that musically, composition is rarely a purely inspirational and complete endeavor. It's lots of editing, transformations, permutations, cut/paste, selective "not caring" in some spots). I think the answer to that question is a more insightful place to start as I think the general public isn't aware of how many formulas and algorithms (conscious and subconscious) composers actually use to construct their music. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schillinger_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schillinger_System (interesting side note: Glenn Miller used the rhythmic tools of the Schillinger System to construct the catchy rhythm component and form of this little diddy you might have heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPXwkWVEIIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPXwkWVEIIw) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_%28composer%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_%28composer%29 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg
muraiki 11y ago
I think that for some genres of music (or perhaps anything "not electronic"), another problem lies in audio synthesis. Part of that "soul" lies not just in the notes played, the volume they are played at, and the duration they are played, but also in manipulation of timbre, the type of attack, and all the other expressive factors that a skillful player of an instrument can bring out. As a brass and wind instrument player, it's painfully obvious to me whenever a song uses fake trumpets or cheesy synthesized shakuhachi. Even for something like violins providing chords behind a melody, it's not hard to discern when they are real and when they are fake. So if we really wanted to make it double-blind, we'd need the actual sound produced to be at a level of a professional musician -- I'd imagine having musicians play back generated sheet music wouldn't work, as they would necessarily impart their own interpretation. But as another commenter said, part of what makes human art interesting is the life experience that forms it. If you reduce music to merely sound, then yes, nothing prevents artifically-generated music from competing against human music. Perhaps we will discover that there is nothing which distinguishes between the two can be heard. But the story of human life that produces the sound of Lee Morgan vs Miles Davis, or hearing the influence of a mentor like Katsuya Yokoyama in a pupil like Tajima Tadashi performing songs others have also performed, is to me as interesting as the music they produce. Ultimately, any algorithm will possess biases present from its original authorship by a human who has tuned it to to "sound right," which is shaped by their own life experiences... so can artificially generated music ever be considered purely artificially generated? (You could also go into things like, for music in non-equal temperament scales, why did the algorithm's author pick a particular tuning?) Finally, one thing I'd like to add is that I could see cases where abstract music would actually be more challenging than structured western music. An algorithm that could compose a compelling shakuhachi honkyoku would be impressive.

pierrec 11y ago

I'm pretty sure David Cope has passed that point already with his algorithmic techniques. However, the kind of formal double-blind that you suggest would be difficult to put together in a way that everyone agrees upon unanimously. It's also a problem that most of his algorithmically created music has never been performed and only exists as poor mock-ups of a performance.

brianclements 11y ago

I've thought a lot about this. It's a very interesting problem to construct a musical Turing test because music is such a relative and personal thing. The "best" works of all time are meaningless to someone with no relationship to the piece, the composer, or the time period. And the spectrum of material is very wide. You can have composers use all kinds of algorithms and methods as "composition tools" [1] to produce works that sound very algorithmic and repetitive to the unfamiliar [2] or seemingly random [3] all the way to the theorized "machine composer" that can also produce seemingly organic music or obviously algorithmic music. Which is more genuine: the algorithmic composition made by a human or the one by a machine/program? What if they use the same algorithmic tools? Before one constructs a musical Turing test of music from machines vs humans, I'd like to see a test first about if people can discern whether algorithmic or formulaic composition techniques were used in a (human composed) piece or whether it was all "organic" (I don't even know how to define that musically, composition is rarely a purely inspirational and complete endeavor. It's lots of editing, transformations, permutations, cut/paste, selective "not caring" in some spots). I think the answer to that question is a more insightful place to start as I think the general public isn't aware of how many formulas and algorithms (conscious and subconscious) composers actually use to construct their music. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schillinger_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schillinger_System (interesting side note: Glenn Miller used the rhythmic tools of the Schillinger System to construct the catchy rhythm component and form of this little diddy you might have heard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPXwkWVEIIw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPXwkWVEIIw) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_%28composer%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Adams_%28composer%29 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Schoenberg

muraiki 11y ago

I think that for some genres of music (or perhaps anything "not electronic"), another problem lies in audio synthesis. Part of that "soul" lies not just in the notes played, the volume they are played at, and the duration they are played, but also in manipulation of timbre, the type of attack, and all the other expressive factors that a skillful player of an instrument can bring out. As a brass and wind instrument player, it's painfully obvious to me whenever a song uses fake trumpets or cheesy synthesized shakuhachi. Even for something like violins providing chords behind a melody, it's not hard to discern when they are real and when they are fake. So if we really wanted to make it double-blind, we'd need the actual sound produced to be at a level of a professional musician -- I'd imagine having musicians play back generated sheet music wouldn't work, as they would necessarily impart their own interpretation. But as another commenter said, part of what makes human art interesting is the life experience that forms it. If you reduce music to merely sound, then yes, nothing prevents artifically-generated music from competing against human music. Perhaps we will discover that there is nothing which distinguishes between the two can be heard. But the story of human life that produces the sound of Lee Morgan vs Miles Davis, or hearing the influence of a mentor like Katsuya Yokoyama in a pupil like Tajima Tadashi performing songs others have also performed, is to me as interesting as the music they produce. Ultimately, any algorithm will possess biases present from its original authorship by a human who has tuned it to to "sound right," which is shaped by their own life experiences... so can artificially generated music ever be considered purely artificially generated? (You could also go into things like, for music in non-equal temperament scales, why did the algorithm's author pick a particular tuning?) Finally, one thing I'd like to add is that I could see cases where abstract music would actually be more challenging than structured western music. An algorithm that could compose a compelling shakuhachi honkyoku would be impressive.