Further to the art and technology debate, especially in relation to Deep Blue and AI, I just read this in Daniel C. Dennett's APA Presidential Address on December 29, 2000. The link is: http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/papers/apapresadd.htm. "But that's just chess, you say, not art. Chess is trivial compared to art (now that the world champion chess player is a computer). This is where David Cope's EMI comes into play. Cope set out to create a mere efficiency-enhancer, a composer's aid to help him over the blockades of composition any creator confronts, a high-tech extension of the traditional search vehicles (the piano, staff paper, the tape recorder, etc.). As EMI grew in competence, it promoted itself into a whole composer, incorporating more and more of the generate-and-test process. When EMI is fed music by Bach, it responds by generating musical compositions in the style of Bach. When given Mozart, or Schubert, or Puccini, or Scott Joplin, it readily analyzes their styles and composes new music in their styles, better pastiches than Cope himself-or almost any human composer-can compose. When fed music by two composers, it can promptly compose pieces that eerily unite their styles, and when fed, all at once (with no clearing of the palate, you might say) all these styles at once, it proceeds to write music based on the totality of its musical experience. The compositions that result can then also be fed back into it, over and over, along with whatever other music comes along in MIDI format, and the result is EMI's own "personal" musical style, a style that candidly reveals its debts to the masters, while being an unquestionably idiosyncratic integration of all this "experience." EMI can now compose not just two-part inventions and art songs but whole symphonies-and has composed over a thousand, when last I heard. They are good enough to fool experts (composers and professors of music) and I can personally attest to the fact that an EMI-Puccini aria brought a lump to my throat-but then, I'm on a hair trigger when it comes to Puccini, and this was a good enough imitation to fool me. David Cope can no more claim to be the composer of EMI's symphonies and motets and art songs than Murray Campbell can claim to have beaten Kasparov in chess." Footnote: For the details, see David Cope, ed., Virtual Music (forthcoming from MIT Press), including my commentary, "Collision Detection, Muselot, and Scribble: Some Reflections on Creativity."
In my opinion, and based purely on the above, software such as EMI could not produce great techno because of the priority given to the characteristics of the sounds used (especially where effects and "found" samples are concerned), rather than the rules of musical theory behind their arrangement. It could be argued that techno is the distillation of music theory, a music that goes beyond the limitations of acoustic musical technology. Once music theory has been distilled to variations upon the theme of the heartbeat, the sound palette can be set free. Electronic music is therefore the inverse of classical music, and other music based on a restricted palette of acoustic sounds. Where in classical music it was the arrangement that defined the style of a composer, with techno it is the sound palette itself. Only in techno does it make sense for a composer to say that using a preset synth sound is either succumbing to cliche or is creative cowardice. My NZ$0.02. Hugo --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
