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As a professional singer of Bach, I feel that the integration of Bach made a lot of sense and worked very well. I am forced to wonder if the author of this revi

by Bud 6y ago

As a professional singer of Bach, I feel that the integration of Bach made a lot of sense and worked very well. I am forced to wonder if the author of this review was a high-level musician.

hobs 6y ago
As a person who is a musical idiot I thought it was a great way to establish the concept of patterns and self reference in something like music. The notion of the self referential cannons was seriously impressive to me and I thought served as a great jumping off point into more esoteric conversations in the book.
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
There still aren't Bach-equivalent counterpoint solvers. ML has been pretty disappointing for music. It can make some music-like objects, especially for short phrases, but it hasn't done a convincing job of producing the real thing. Music is hard. It's far harder than most people realise. Winning a game is a relatively easy problem, because you know when you have won. Music is much more nebulous. Grammatical correctness is preparatory to creative intent. Even basic metrics of correctness are rather fuzzy. ML doesn't have any concept of intent, so it tends to flail around in a statistical space - and to sound like it.
- jancsika 6y ago
  Judgment of music quality also happens to be highly subjective. Suppose an AI created a Bach-like contrapuntal exercise with a lot of cross-relations (i.e., clashing dissonant sounds). Would scholars judge it to be at the level of Bach because of the handling of these numerous cross-relations? Or would they claim it isn't at sophisticated as Bach because having that many cross-relations isn't stylistically accurate? Based on the historiography of musicology I would guess the latter. Even though there's an unfinished extant Bach fugue in C minor where he's essentially role-playing a cross-relation obsessed AI composer. The history of theory is even worse. For example, Schenker created theories based on the mastery that Bach, Beethoven, and others displayed in their compositions. But when a piece by Bach didn't fit his theory, he claimed that Bach actually wrote it incorrectly! I'm afraid AI music research is going to have to put up with the same irrationality of humans as every other subjective endeavor. That is, musicians will kick and scream that AI "isn't doing it right," then when it inevitably becomes embedded as a core part of music making we'll hear all about how music produced with classical algorithms on old protools rigs sounds so much "warmer."
commandlinefan 6y ago
On the other side of the spectrum, I myself am a relative musical neanderthal, having gone into the book not even knowing what the word "fugue" meant. I was fascinated by the way he related this sort of musical "recursion" back to general mathematical problem solving. When I read OP's dismissal of it, I figured I was just underthinking whether it was a good analogy or not, being the unsophisticate that I am - nice to see that somebody who does have some expertise on the subject weighing in.
_jal 6y ago
Agree. I am not a musician, but have absorbed a lot by having lived with them. Weaving Bach in makes perfect sense.
pdonis 6y ago
> As a professional singer of Bach, I feel that the integration of Bach made a lot of sense and worked very well. I am only an amateur player of Bach, but I felt the same way. However, it probably is worth noting that a major reason why Bach works in this context is the particular nature of his music--or more precisely the particular subsample of his music that GEB refers to. I don't think the music of most other composers, or even some of Bach's less contrapuntal music, would have made sense in this context.

by Bud 6y ago

As a professional singer of Bach, I feel that the integration of Bach made a lot of sense and worked very well. I am forced to wonder if the author of this review was a high-level musician.

hobs 6y ago

As a person who is a musical idiot I thought it was a great way to establish the concept of patterns and self reference in something like music. The notion of the self referential cannons was seriously impressive to me and I thought served as a great jumping off point into more esoteric conversations in the book.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

There still aren't Bach-equivalent counterpoint solvers. ML has been pretty disappointing for music. It can make some music-like objects, especially for short phrases, but it hasn't done a convincing job of producing the real thing. Music is hard. It's far harder than most people realise. Winning a game is a relatively easy problem, because you know when you have won. Music is much more nebulous. Grammatical correctness is preparatory to creative intent. Even basic metrics of correctness are rather fuzzy. ML doesn't have any concept of intent, so it tends to flail around in a statistical space - and to sound like it.

jancsika 6y ago
Judgment of music quality also happens to be highly subjective. Suppose an AI created a Bach-like contrapuntal exercise with a lot of cross-relations (i.e., clashing dissonant sounds). Would scholars judge it to be at the level of Bach because of the handling of these numerous cross-relations? Or would they claim it isn't at sophisticated as Bach because having that many cross-relations isn't stylistically accurate? Based on the historiography of musicology I would guess the latter. Even though there's an unfinished extant Bach fugue in C minor where he's essentially role-playing a cross-relation obsessed AI composer. The history of theory is even worse. For example, Schenker created theories based on the mastery that Bach, Beethoven, and others displayed in their compositions. But when a piece by Bach didn't fit his theory, he claimed that Bach actually wrote it incorrectly! I'm afraid AI music research is going to have to put up with the same irrationality of humans as every other subjective endeavor. That is, musicians will kick and scream that AI "isn't doing it right," then when it inevitably becomes embedded as a core part of music making we'll hear all about how music produced with classical algorithms on old protools rigs sounds so much "warmer."

commandlinefan 6y ago

On the other side of the spectrum, I myself am a relative musical neanderthal, having gone into the book not even knowing what the word "fugue" meant. I was fascinated by the way he related this sort of musical "recursion" back to general mathematical problem solving. When I read OP's dismissal of it, I figured I was just underthinking whether it was a good analogy or not, being the unsophisticate that I am - nice to see that somebody who does have some expertise on the subject weighing in.

_jal 6y ago

Agree. I am not a musician, but have absorbed a lot by having lived with them. Weaving Bach in makes perfect sense.

pdonis 6y ago

> As a professional singer of Bach, I feel that the integration of Bach made a lot of sense and worked very well. I am only an amateur player of Bach, but I felt the same way. However, it probably is worth noting that a major reason why Bach works in this context is the particular nature of his music--or more precisely the particular subsample of his music that GEB refers to. I don't think the music of most other composers, or even some of Bach's less contrapuntal music, would have made sense in this context.