6 ms·

Computer program writing great, original works of classical music

49 points by aho 16y ago

anon-e-moose 16y ago
No it isn't. What an absolutely ridiculous claim. The two "Bach-like" pieces are rubbish, full of strange discontinuities and random meanderings, not to mention the rhythm just hammering away in a very set pattern. Reminds me of terrible beginning piano workbook pieces, only less musical. On the next page, the other "fugue" does bizarre things that I don't think a human composer would. The beginning is entirely discontinuous, and doesn't really sound like a beginning. A real fugue isn't just something being played repeatedly in different intervals. If that's the best that the program has to offer, then I'm not sure what it's accomplished. Just because it can combine complicated things doesn't mean its composed anything, because it doesn't understand the parts. If someone copied and pasted parts of great books, and then tried to weave the parts together, would the result be any good? Or even great books by the same author. Maybe that's a weak analogy though. I feel sorry for the Slate writer if he can't tell the difference between the Bach and this noise, he's seriously missing out.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  Ah! Discontinuous, that nails it perfectly. I couldn't find the right word, but that's exactly the feeling, it breaks up. The best I could come up with was 'random sentences from a book'.
jacquesm 16y ago
Halfway down are two little 'click to play' boxes that claim to be Bach like. I'm no virtuoso, but I can play the piano a little bit and that stuff sounds so mechanistic to me it's not even funny. The first impression you get is of a very bad player piano roll (the caption says the 'tinny' sound is because of the MIDI, but that's not what I'm getting at, it's the totally 'dead' delivery, like a corpse playing the piano). And that's just the first bit, the compositions are absolutely boring, even the simplest piece from 'das Notenbuchlein' blows this away. Glenn Gould and Dinu Lipatti are turning over in their respective graves, Bach himself is positively spinning. If 'most people' really can't tell the difference between that music and the real thing it is sad. I don't doubt that in the future we'll reach a point where computers will compose music on par with human composers but these two samples leave me underwhelmed. I think the proper thing to do here is to appreciate the fact that the pig can dance at all but to my ears it is just painful.
- jim_dot 16y ago
  I seem to remember a while ago there was a program featured on - maybe Slate - that had a much more impressive output, but I think it was actually played by a human and just written by a computer.
  - jacquesm 16y ago
    That would at least get away from the 'player piano' sound, but it wouldn't fix the problems with the composition. In Amsterdam there is a small, and relatively unknown museum full of pianolas (player pianos) run by Kasper Janse. I know the guy because I once found a pianola somewhere and it ended up in his museum. When I delivered it there he took me through the rooms and showed me his machines, one by one and I told him I could close my eyes and pick out any pianola compared to the 'real' thing (a person playing). So he showed me his 'piece the resistance'. A one-off, a machine constructed to be the 'state-of-the-art' in modern recording technology. It featured a roll played by Rachmaninoff himself, with as many parameters captured as possible, including stroke velocity, pedals, the works, and at a ridiculously high sample rate (for the day, at least). The effect was amazing, it was as though the ghost of Rachmaninoff had come to life and even while writing this I still get gooseflesh. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in music, and it was lightyears ahead of the compact discs of today in terms of delivery. What an amazing sound. And, if you've never seen a 'player piano' at work, the keys move as though invisible fingers press them down. The reason there is only one of those machines (and very very few rolls, they had to be 'recorded' by virtuoso players instead of 'punched') is that the phonograph happened. If you're ever in Amsterdam, well worth a visit: http://www.pianola.nl/Pianola_Museum/Homepage.html http://www.pianola.nl/Pianola_Museum/Homepage.html
    - joe_bleau 16y ago
      Conlon Nancarrow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow) did some really wild stuff with similar pianos (technically, I think they're called reproducing instead of player). His stuff is so complex that it's impossible to humanly play, so punching paper was his only option. I'd certainly consider him a hacker in that regard.
techiferous 16y ago
No sense of timing or rhythm. Even an algorithm that adds a random delay to notes would make it sound more natural. I listened to previews of the album on iTunes and it sounds like crap.
- pohl 16y ago
  That is the nature of a MIDI rendering. The output of this program is a composition, not composition-plus-interpretation.
  - techiferous 16y ago
    Ah, that makes sense. Did you listen to the album, too?
    - pohl 16y ago
      Not yet, but I might set aside some time to do it. I'm impressed with the snippets, but I have a hunch that I'd be able to tell a generated work from the real stuff.
  - dangrover 16y ago
    It's not a limitation of the format -- you can make a MIDI of a live performance and get those imperfections. It just doesn't make sense, as you mention, because it's not producing a performance, it's producing the underlying composition.
techiferous 16y ago
"Audiences have been moved to tears by melodies created by algorithms." This can be read two ways...
- joubert 16y ago
  Plus they don't qualify what audiences!
herdrick 16y ago
This is music sort of like the writing you get from a Markov text generator. Except much better. Has anyone gotten any good thoughts or ideas from a Markov text generator? And that illuminates something about music: the patterns aren't as complex as language. This is going to cause a giant re-ranking of composers, as those whose music seems most like computer-generated stuff will seem less impressive now. (That will be wrong, but it's what people will think anyway.) Interestingly, the ones who create the noisiest stuff will benefit the most, whereas those whose compositions are perfectly expressed in the linear notation of sheet music will lose out. Ramones in, Beethoven down, Rachmaninoff out.
- ebiester 16y ago
  The Ramones and Punk may be the wrong example. Most punk, early or late, relies on pretty simple structures.
  - herdrick 16y ago
    Right, but it's in how it sounds. Hmmm, maybe what I want to say is that the performer is up and the composer is down.
hernan7 16y ago
Another article on Cope, with a Hofstadter cameo and non-MIDI samples: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/ http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-...
manlon 16y ago
The MIDI samples were a really poor choice to introduce the program's compositions, but those snippets do sound a lot like Bach chorales stylistically, perhaps at the level a competent (if uninspiring) student of harmony. The chorales exist online in machine-readable formats at http://www.jsbchorales.net/ http://www.jsbchorales.net/ (a great resource for doing comprehensive analysis on chorale harmony -- wouldn't doubt if the same data served as input for the Emmy program).
elblanco 16y ago
So when can I d/l a GPL music generator so I can generate billions of hours of music in the background.
blehn 16y ago
This technology would be great for amateur filmmakers, especially those who aren't skilled musicians. Imagine a UI with sliders to create the desired mood, tempo, emotion, etc. Maybe the result isn't a John Williams score, but it sounds professional, is easy to produce, and is royalty free. I suppose the drawback is if the software is easily accessible, and everyone uses similar databases of sources, the compositions could all start to sound alike.
- michaelkeenan 16y ago
  And also great for low-budget computer games.
  - blehn 16y ago
    Yeah, maybe even better for that.

49 points by aho 16y ago

No it isn't. What an absolutely ridiculous claim. The two "Bach-like" pieces are rubbish, full of strange discontinuities and random meanderings, not to mention the rhythm just hammering away in a very set pattern. Reminds me of terrible beginning piano workbook pieces, only less musical. On the next page, the other "fugue" does bizarre things that I don't think a human composer would. The beginning is entirely discontinuous, and doesn't really sound like a beginning. A real fugue isn't just something being played repeatedly in different intervals. If that's the best that the program has to offer, then I'm not sure what it's accomplished. Just because it can combine complicated things doesn't mean its composed anything, because it doesn't understand the parts. If someone copied and pasted parts of great books, and then tried to weave the parts together, would the result be any good? Or even great books by the same author. Maybe that's a weak analogy though. I feel sorry for the Slate writer if he can't tell the difference between the Bach and this noise, he's seriously missing out.

jacquesm 16y ago
Ah! Discontinuous, that nails it perfectly. I couldn't find the right word, but that's exactly the feeling, it breaks up. The best I could come up with was 'random sentences from a book'.

jacquesm 16y ago

Halfway down are two little 'click to play' boxes that claim to be Bach like. I'm no virtuoso, but I can play the piano a little bit and that stuff sounds so mechanistic to me it's not even funny. The first impression you get is of a very bad player piano roll (the caption says the 'tinny' sound is because of the MIDI, but that's not what I'm getting at, it's the totally 'dead' delivery, like a corpse playing the piano). And that's just the first bit, the compositions are absolutely boring, even the simplest piece from 'das Notenbuchlein' blows this away. Glenn Gould and Dinu Lipatti are turning over in their respective graves, Bach himself is positively spinning. If 'most people' really can't tell the difference between that music and the real thing it is sad. I don't doubt that in the future we'll reach a point where computers will compose music on par with human composers but these two samples leave me underwhelmed. I think the proper thing to do here is to appreciate the fact that the pig can dance at all but to my ears it is just painful.

jim_dot 16y ago
I seem to remember a while ago there was a program featured on - maybe Slate - that had a much more impressive output, but I think it was actually played by a human and just written by a computer.
- jacquesm 16y ago
  That would at least get away from the 'player piano' sound, but it wouldn't fix the problems with the composition. In Amsterdam there is a small, and relatively unknown museum full of pianolas (player pianos) run by Kasper Janse. I know the guy because I once found a pianola somewhere and it ended up in his museum. When I delivered it there he took me through the rooms and showed me his machines, one by one and I told him I could close my eyes and pick out any pianola compared to the 'real' thing (a person playing). So he showed me his 'piece the resistance'. A one-off, a machine constructed to be the 'state-of-the-art' in modern recording technology. It featured a roll played by Rachmaninoff himself, with as many parameters captured as possible, including stroke velocity, pedals, the works, and at a ridiculously high sample rate (for the day, at least). The effect was amazing, it was as though the ghost of Rachmaninoff had come to life and even while writing this I still get gooseflesh. It was the most amazing thing I've ever seen in music, and it was lightyears ahead of the compact discs of today in terms of delivery. What an amazing sound. And, if you've never seen a 'player piano' at work, the keys move as though invisible fingers press them down. The reason there is only one of those machines (and very very few rolls, they had to be 'recorded' by virtuoso players instead of 'punched') is that the phonograph happened. If you're ever in Amsterdam, well worth a visit: http://www.pianola.nl/Pianola_Museum/Homepage.html http://www.pianola.nl/Pianola_Museum/Homepage.html
  - joe_bleau 16y ago
    Conlon Nancarrow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conlon_Nancarrow) did some really wild stuff with similar pianos (technically, I think they're called reproducing instead of player). His stuff is so complex that it's impossible to humanly play, so punching paper was his only option. I'd certainly consider him a hacker in that regard.

techiferous 16y ago

No sense of timing or rhythm. Even an algorithm that adds a random delay to notes would make it sound more natural. I listened to previews of the album on iTunes and it sounds like crap.

pohl 16y ago
That is the nature of a MIDI rendering. The output of this program is a composition, not composition-plus-interpretation.
- techiferous 16y ago
  Ah, that makes sense. Did you listen to the album, too?
  - pohl 16y ago
    Not yet, but I might set aside some time to do it. I'm impressed with the snippets, but I have a hunch that I'd be able to tell a generated work from the real stuff.
- dangrover 16y ago
  It's not a limitation of the format -- you can make a MIDI of a live performance and get those imperfections. It just doesn't make sense, as you mention, because it's not producing a performance, it's producing the underlying composition.

techiferous 16y ago

"Audiences have been moved to tears by melodies created by algorithms." This can be read two ways...

joubert 16y ago
Plus they don't qualify what audiences!

herdrick 16y ago

This is music sort of like the writing you get from a Markov text generator. Except much better. Has anyone gotten any good thoughts or ideas from a Markov text generator? And that illuminates something about music: the patterns aren't as complex as language. This is going to cause a giant re-ranking of composers, as those whose music seems most like computer-generated stuff will seem less impressive now. (That will be wrong, but it's what people will think anyway.) Interestingly, the ones who create the noisiest stuff will benefit the most, whereas those whose compositions are perfectly expressed in the linear notation of sheet music will lose out. Ramones in, Beethoven down, Rachmaninoff out.

ebiester 16y ago
The Ramones and Punk may be the wrong example. Most punk, early or late, relies on pretty simple structures.
- herdrick 16y ago
  Right, but it's in how it sounds. Hmmm, maybe what I want to say is that the performer is up and the composer is down.

hernan7 16y ago

Another article on Cope, with a Hofstadter cameo and non-MIDI samples: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/ http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-...

manlon 16y ago

The MIDI samples were a really poor choice to introduce the program's compositions, but those snippets do sound a lot like Bach chorales stylistically, perhaps at the level a competent (if uninspiring) student of harmony. The chorales exist online in machine-readable formats at http://www.jsbchorales.net/ http://www.jsbchorales.net/ (a great resource for doing comprehensive analysis on chorale harmony -- wouldn't doubt if the same data served as input for the Emmy program).

elblanco 16y ago

So when can I d/l a GPL music generator so I can generate billions of hours of music in the background.

blehn 16y ago

This technology would be great for amateur filmmakers, especially those who aren't skilled musicians. Imagine a UI with sliders to create the desired mood, tempo, emotion, etc. Maybe the result isn't a John Williams score, but it sounds professional, is easy to produce, and is royalty free. I suppose the drawback is if the software is easily accessible, and everyone uses similar databases of sources, the compositions could all start to sound alike.

michaelkeenan 16y ago
And also great for low-budget computer games.
- blehn 16y ago
  Yeah, maybe even better for that.