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Scott Burson's avatar

I would like to offer a few comforts to anyone inclined to be terrified by programs like EMI.

First is the simple and obvious point that EMI could not have composed like Chopin if Chopin had not existed. Chopin, on the other hand, wasn't copying anyone.

Second, Hofstadter's experiment contains a crucial flaw. He had to use a very obscure Chopin piece, lest the professional musicologists in the audience recognize it. But surely the piece deserved its obscurity! So the comparison was between EMI's mashup of Chopin's best work — probably not even including lesser pieces in its database — and a throwaway that Chopin probably tossed off one day when he had a hangover. Not fair at all.

And thirdly, reading your description of how EMI worked, it's clear that this is not AI composing music from scratch on its own; this is David Cope writing a program incorporating a considerable amount of his own knowledge about composition, along with stylistic elements from great composers, to generate music. In short, the agency and the genius, if it was genius, lay within Cope, not the machine. If computers didn't exist, Cope could in principle have done the same thing with pencil and paper and dice; would that have meant the dice were composing music?

Perhaps these observations will help people ... uh ... cope :-)

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RMC's avatar

I imagine generative AI, suitably trained on sheet music, can make something that sounds much more like bach, most of the time (with a few bars of pure absurdity now and then). But it sounds like copes code is a lot more useful if we want to actually understand Bach. I miss the days when it seemed like these goals of reproducing and understanding seemed inextricably linked. Spectacular thougn they are, interesting though they are, sometimes LLMs feel like part of the plot of "idiocracy".

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