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Music is not just notes. With the exception of some of the modern genres (dance/electronica mostly) music is performed by people and truly good music has nuance
by mojuba 17y ago
Music is not just notes. With the exception of some of the modern genres (dance/electronica mostly) music is performed by people and truly good music has nuances not seen in the scores.
There are performances of Bach that I'd turn off after 20 seconds, and there are those I keep in my music collection for years, if not decades. Performaces differ dramatically.
Or take Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here - was it the scores, or rather Gilmour's unique articulation on the guitar that made us listen to this album? How about John Coltrane's emotional outbursts on the sax? Nina Simone's cosmic-deep vocals?
Music is a far more subtle art, not yet understood from the point of view of Cognitive Science. What random notes are you talking about?
- crescendo 17y agoIf you keep generating random series of tones, eventually you will end up with Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here or any other piece ever recorded.
- mojuba 17y agoThat's probably a very clever way of producing music, but I don't want to wait billions of years until an awesome performance of Mozart's concerto No.17 emerges from your machine. I want it now, please. Thank you.
- endtime 17y agoRight, but with good heuristics it wouldn't take billions of years to generate a good piece of music. Anyway, there's a difference between something being impossible and something requiring a large amount of time.
- mojuba 17y agoHeuristics - you mean, you know how we perceive music? Can you explain what makes a piece of music good? Same for performance - why are some performances of the same piece of music better than others?
- endtime 17y agoIf I could explain what made a piece of music could I could write a direct algorithm. The kind of heuristic I mean is something that would rule out the vast majority of dissonant crap that has no chance of sounding good.
- mojuba 17y agoA lot of what was believed to be "dissonant crap" some 50 years ago is now part of jazz and avantgarde. Many jazz fans value Thelonious Monk's music, for example, more than any popular harmonious crap. Obviously you are not familiar with music. Good luck in exploring it before you try to formalize it.
- endtime 17y agoI think you are still missing the point. Would you not agree that in the entire space of all possible sequences of noise, the vast majority could never be considered music?
- mojuba 17y agoOk, you can omit noise and leave only the chromatic scale (12 notes). In this space you will have to go through all possible combinations of notes in a chord and then all possible sequences of chords for some, say, 16 bars, plus you have to generate the theme on top of your chords (or the theme first and then the chords - that will do too). Then possibly variations, improvizations, and so on. Then there may be deliberate "detuned" elements, like in Gilmour's solo improvizations or Nina Simone's vocals. This looks like a huge tree for your search. To add complexity, in some modern genres like electronica musicians also express themselves using timbre dynamics combined with notes. But apart from that, there's a problem with identifying automatically which of your variants you generated are good, which comes down to what is good music. Then performance. We usually appreciate good performance and a lot of people are not interested in hearing precise robotic play. Again, what makes a performance good? Nobody knows, there's no theory. Having said that, what's the point of doing tree search at all?