On Demand
Musical DNA
Which came first: Language or Music? We're still not sure, but now we'll ponder what comes next.
Producer Jonathan Mitchell brings us a piece about David Cope, the composer and professor at UC Santa Cruz, who cured his artist’s block by writing a computer program to do the dirtywork for him. His program, named EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence), deconstructs the works of great composers, finding patterns within the voice leading of their compositions, and then creates brand new compositions based on the patterns she finds. But it's not just copy and paste. She brings something new to the pieces. Drift along to the eerily enchanting music of EMI Mahler and ask yourself this:
What would Mahler think of an EMI Mahler score? Brillant music? A forgery?
» Hear EMI's compositions
» More on David Cope
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I think that the people who get so upset upon hearing and learning about EMI (e.g. the colleague who poked Cope in the nose), are fundamentally misunderstanding what he has done. Cope has basically developed a way of riffing on other composers. Much like a scratch rap artist resamples old music to make a new work, Cope's program recombines bits and patterns of a composer to make a new work. If we like it, if it sounds good, it is because the music of the original composer sounds good and Cope has done a good job of figuring out a way to recombine the pieces in a pleasing format.
Contrast what Cope has done to an automated text generator. They are very different things. When a text generator analyzes a large set of texts and then generates a new text, the result is almost impossible to read because there is no intent to communicate behind the words. There is no point in reading it.
When EMI produces a derivative work of Mozart, it probably lacks the patterns within patterns within patterns of the maestro's intellect, but it may still sound nice and be interesting because it is the fruit of the maestro's seed. It may also be surprising because it does not take some expected turns. We should rejoice that there is more music in the world in styles that we appreciate because of EMI.
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