I saw part of "Pluto Nash" on tv last night. It is a scifi comic thriller vehicle for Eddie Murphy (i.e., silly) set 50-100 yrs in the future. At one point they go to a night club where a big jazz band is playing a production number alla Frank Sinatra.
When the singer introduces the band, which is playing like mad, it turns out to be a single guy holding down one key on a keyboard. I think it points out the absurdity of the idea of replacing musicians with machines. It will happen (has happened) in many areas, of course, where cost matters more than quality. But ultimately music is about communication, and people want to see the monkey perform. Another way to think of it is this. The better technology gets at imitating a human performance, the more discerning humans become at recognizing the fake. This has certainly been true of sound reproduction. It is difficult for us to imagine how anyone mistook the scratchy earliest recordings for people playing music or speaking, but listeners in the late 19th century did, because they had nothing to compare it to. Ultimately, virtual reality and artificial intelligence systems may eventually be able to completely fool us, but that day is very far away, and I don't worry about it much. In my experience with engineered systems (which is not insignificance), features of the system of necessity creep in that detract from the engineering goals, and these are inevitable giveaways. Technology is frequently useful, but it will (probably) always be technology, meaning it has a tech support number somewhere with about 100 levels of voice menus. -- Robert Patterson http://www.robertgpatterson.com _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
