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Joined: February 10 2010
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Topic: Music composed by computers Posted: September 16 2014 at 07:48
I remember that in the late 80's there started to circulate rumors that there were already computers capable of composing music given a certain set of desired parameters (should it sound joyful? or sad? or haunting? or melancholic? simple or complex? length? ....), and that already some commercial music was being actually written by computers, such as some pop hits, music for movie scores or commercials etc.
With hindsight that was probably not really accurate and may have come from some people misunderstanding devices like the Synclavier or the Fairlight which were computers designed to aiding people in the job of creating music, but did not 'compose' music by themselves (as far as I know), together with the fact that possibly there were indeed some experimental programs at universities or research centers which could indeed produce musical patterns completely artificially.
We are quite some years ahead now and I wonder what is really the situation. Does software indeed exist which can produce reasonably complete music? If so, are these really used in the music industry? or is it still easier and cheaper to just have people doing the job?
Joined: August 02 2014
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 07:49
I'm willing to bet that today (and even earlier than today, honestly) software exists where algorithms can be programmed and coded to create very impressive music. Both with and without a composer. I'm ready for someone to come in here and drop some links, because I've got none atm.
"A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous. Got me?"
Joined: February 10 2010
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 11:59
Slartibartfast wrote:
You might find this interesting - http://www.progarchives.com/album.asp?id=8527 COMPUTER EXPERIMENTS, VOL. 1 Synergy
That's interesting, thanks. 1981 was indeed very early so I guess that I would not find a Cinema Show in that album .
You know what they say, put a monkey in front of a typewriter for eternity and eventually he will write Shakespeare's works. So put a computer composing music at a sufficiently fast rate and eventually it will produce something awesome.
But besides that (random generation and just waiting for the great to happen), now it is possible to build in some sort of 'artificial selection mechanism' to the computer's output. Let it know what humans find pleasant and what not, and it can learn to produce output which is pleasant, discarding other possibilities which have features which have been formerly tagged as 'unpleasant'.
Personally I'm not to excited at the idea that computers may become good composers, I'm just interested to know how far are we into that.
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 12:10
Back in the 80s I had a program on the Amiga that could algorithmically compose Bach-like fugues. I think it had a library of 100s of individual phrases that it could stitch together following a set of rules to form a 16 bar sequence. I believe there was another program that essentially coded the Well-tempered Clavier.
There have been other automatic composers that use fractal maths to create music, but honestly most of them were no better than having a random note generator (so that's Avant Prog then).
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 12:16
I think I've seen a video or something about that. Don't know if it's true. But if it is, it's still a man made composing system. No different from aleatory or total serialism or tonal harmony. Just requires less effort. Things still have to be deliberated by its user.
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 12:24
If so, I wonder how come that there has not been more advance in artificial music composers. Many other areas of computing and AI have experienced significant developments in the last decades. Perhaps a musician is cheap enough so there's no big merit in replacing him by a machine.
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 12:33
The T wrote:
I prefer music composed by composers
How can you know? if you have to move around, do you prefer doing so with a manually drawn territory map than what your GPS navigation system can show you?
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 12:38
There probably isn't any merit to hiring a machine unless you're writing a utility— a radio hit, a jingle. Something that doesn't require human experience to create. I'd be all for music being written by computers if that music were unique, or sounded like it was written by a computer. But it just sounds like whoever the deliberator wants it to sound like. Yeah, okay, it can write a piece that sounds like a Bach Cantata, but why? It doesn't really serve the purpose of expression from a composer's standpoint. Humans will always be expressing themselves through music because it's almost a basic need. And any sensible music listener would be willing to give them an ear, even if there were computers in the market.
Besides, even if artificial music composers picked up, it'd probably just be dismissed as a fad two years later.
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 12:40
Gerinski wrote:
The T wrote:
I prefer music composed by composers
How can you know? if you have to move around, do you prefer doing so with a manually drawn territory map than what your GPS navigation system can show you?
The GPS guides you, but you are the doing doing the actual moving. In the same vein, if a composer uses a computer to help him compose that is fine (though it's questionable whether I will like it). If the computer itself generates the music vi algorithms and more, it won't work for me.
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 12:42
Dean wrote:
There have been other automatic composers that use fractal maths to create music, but honestly most of them were no better than having a random note generator (so that's Avant Prog then).
I had some software years ago that would randomly generate music (I forget the name now) but it all sounded like background meditation music. I expect someone will write a program soon that will knock out the entire Westlife catalogue in a couple of hours.
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 13:17
chopper wrote:
Dean wrote:
There have been other automatic composers that use fractal maths to create music, but honestly most of them were no better than having a random note generator (so that's Avant Prog then).
I had some software years ago that would randomly generate music (I forget the name now) but it all sounded like background meditation music. I expect someone will write a program soon that will knock out the entire Westlife catalogue in a couple of hours.
That would be about an hour and a half longer than it took to write the originals.
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 14:17
So, if I understand you all well, by 2014 computer-composed music is not used in practice. There may be some technical possibilities for it but they are not used in the practical world. Right?
Will computer-composed music become a practical product in the near future?
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 14:24
The T wrote:
Gerinski wrote:
The T wrote:
I prefer music composed by composers
How can you know? if you have to move around, do you prefer doing so with a manually drawn territory map than what your GPS navigation system can show you?
The GPS guides you, but you are the doing doing the actual moving. In the same vein, if a composer uses a computer to help him compose that is fine (though it's questionable whether I will like it). If the computer itself generates the music vi algorithms and more, it won't work for me.
I was not referring to the actual moving but to generating the map. Generating it manually would take a lot of work (if you should include what the GPS can, petrol stations, restaurants, hotels, points of interests and so forth). The GPS provides you a route for a trip. In a sense a music composition does also provide you with a guide for a mental trip. There is no reason in principle why it could not be made by a machine if the machine knows which kind of trip do you enjoy.
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 14:33
Gerinski wrote:
So, if I understand you all well, by 2014 computer-composed music is not used in practice. There may be some technical possibilities for it but they are not used in the practical world. Right?
Will computer-composed music become a practical product in the near future?
It's too limited to become a practical product for art, I think, and the only way to remove those limits is to involve more human interference and deliberation, but it could become a helpful product for relaxation music, jingles, music therapy, and anything else that's music but not necessarily for the same purpose. That said, I don't think anybody's in a big hurry to replace composers for any purpose.
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Posted: September 16 2014 at 15:53
Composing music isn't difficult - it can't be because musicians aren't exactly front of the queue in the smarts department and they can do it.
So any one can compose, it isn't difficult, even people who cannot play an instrument and have no musical training can hum, whistle or lah a short melody. Whether consciously or subconsciously when we do this we are following simple rules that we've picked up from just listening to other songs, the notes we pick to follow each other will not be random, they will have a tonal relationship to each other that sounds "right" - the notes will just "fit". With a little practice and more listening that melody can be made into a complete song, there are literally millions of examples out there to show the way.
Those rules and relationships can be programmed into a computer, that's relatively simple (because musicians are not complicated) - the more rules and relationships you can program the more realistic the final piece.
This clip is generally considered to be one of the first computer composed piece of music and is as old as I am:
NB: that was composed by a computer but played by humans. While the computer composed the notes and arrangement, it was interpreted by humans.
Every limitation that you can think of regarding computer generated composition can be resolved with another set of rules and relationship, we can even have a set of rules and relationships that determine which set of rules and relationships to apply next.
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Music composed by computers
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