On Demand
Musical DNA
- Comments [1]
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?
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Forgive me, but I don't understand what the fuss is about. EMI's creator is brilliant, as are the composers from which she derives her data. Could EMI create an analytical engine that recombines musical features? And from where do those features (you call them "clichés") come? Could EMI make EMI music?
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