Technology | 2009.10.31
This artificially intelligent music may speak to our minds, but not our souls | Mark Lawson
Musicians express the communication between humans, something Emily Howell will never be able to understand
Imagine a Prom concert of the future. The audience in the Royal Albert Hall open their programmes to see the authors of the evening\'s music listed: between Richard Wagner and Olivier Messiaen lies a piece by Emily Howell. They might guess (correctly) that this is a young composer but, were they to call for a bow, the creator of the piece would need to be carried on to the stage. The bracketed life-dates would give it away: Wagner (1813-83), Messiaen (1908-1992), Howell (2009-infinity).
The announcement from the University of California at Santa Cruz of what is claimed to be the first software which can produce original classical music intriguingly synthesises human fears of technology with long-running debates about the meaning of creativity. Professor David Cope, who made and named Emily (from the initials of Experiments in Musical Intelligence), reports having tricked listeners. An academic who was played Howell\'s Op 1 – a piano concerto, called From Darkness, Light – warmed to its sound, then rapidly chilled when advised where it came from.
Some of the suspicion of Howell is not artistic, but a primitive robot-phobia. More or less since the invention of the wheel, homo sapiens has hovered between a desire for machines to take over the messy or tedious stuff – waste-disposal, production line work – and a dread of eventual human redundancy in the interesting bits of existence: art, chess, sex. With the advent of Emily, composers and critics of classical music feel as actors do when they note the box-office popularity of computer-generated movies. What used to be a jokey proposition about probability – the chance that monkeys on typewriters would eventually create the works of Shakespeare – has been replaced by the genuine fear that an untouched keyboard may soon start writing plays.
And the problem is that some of what seem to be the most compelling arguments against Emily Howell soon crumble to the touch. Music, we cry, should come from a brain and hand rather than a microchip; but increasing numbers of composers of all kinds of music use computers to a level at which the machines become less a tool than a collaborator or even muse.
And Howell is, her critics say, dumbly re-arranging phrases from the work of earlier human composers into a new pattern which is only theoretically original. But a large proportion of new work in all art forms is derivative because even the greatest artists adopt and adapt a model: Joyce seeding Beckett who then fed Pinter. And, in cases of lesser creators, this inspiration can become cynical copying, a phenomenon increasing when commercial conditions discourage risk. Many millions have been made in music, literature and art by those who have created, with not much less cold calculation than a computer programme, a mix of the previous achievements of others.
It can even be argued, in another challenge to our proud concept of human artistic originality, that most creative figures eventually become unknowingly programmed, whirringly replicating formulas, patterns and codes stored deep in their hard-drive. During interviews, composers, choreographers, novelists and dramatists have all mentioned to me the risk of "muscle memory", the desire of the mind and body to repeat what it has been trained to do. Emily Howell\'s sixth symphony, we might object, will simply randomly reshuffle the sounds of her first. But, were she to sue over this charge, her counsel could call a number of distinguished defence witnesses from the CD shelves.
So logic is on her side. Art, though, is illogical. Although she can be defended intellectually, the creator of From Darkness, Light is no more a composer than a synthetic sperm knocked up in a laboratory would be a father.
Music, writing or art is a communication between two humans. This does not mean it has to be emotional or warm – a delusion industrialised in large parts of Hollywood – but that there is some sort of conversation between two members of the same species, even if the artist\'s side of the exchange is "go away and leave me alone".
Paradoxically, it was JD Salinger, a novelist who has refused any rapport with his readership outside the pages of the books, who most beautifully captured this truth when the narrator of The Catcher in the Rye suggests that reading a really good book makes you want to phone up the author. A composition by Emily Howell might make us want to email her, but we know that she could not reply. Admittedly, we also know that Salinger wouldn\'t take our phone call, but the crucial difference is that he could if he wanted to.
A computer, cleverly programmed, could probably produce the Doubting Thomas Passion by JS Bach or More Snow on Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway. But the exercise would be worthless because the works from the software would not be informed by being a God-fearing kapelmeister in 18th-century Germany or a suicidal macho male in mid-20th century America.
Our shelves may be full of composers and writers who could be accused of having only artificial intelligence, but their efforts are still more worthwhile than art created by AI. "From the heart – may it go to the heart," wrote Beethoven on the manuscript of his Missa Solemnis. From the byte to the brain can never be equivalent to that.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]22/music-computer-compose-copy
