It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand.''
It ''would have to wander around the world on its own,'' he wrote, ''fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it.
The machine would have to learn what it feels like to be alive. A program that could produce music as mesmerizing as the great masters', he concluded, would require more than simple routines for stringing together notes. Hofstadter speculated on whether uplifting music would ever be composed by an artificially intelligent machine. In his Pulitzer-prizewinning book ''Godel, Escher, Bach,'' published in 1979, Dr. The implication, which many composers and musicians emphatically reject, is that musical style might just consist of a collection of simple recipes, that the feelings and intent of the composer might not be so important after all.
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Its entire inner world consists of rules for how to sift through past compositions for characteristic patterns of melodies, harmonies and rhythms, and then to recombine them into plausible (and sometimes beautiful) music.
It has no passions, no memories and knows nothing about life. It was certainly in the ball park.''Īll of this is rather disconcerting to music lovers who believe that the unique style of a composer springs from a deep well of emotion and experience, that the creator of a composition is speaking musically in a very special way. But it was very much like a work of the same period. Linda Burman-Hall, who played the piano solo for the concerto, said: ''It felt a little different than playing a normal Mozart work. On a more ambitious level, EMI recently composed a full-scale Mozart symphony and piano concerto, which were performed in April by the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival on period instruments. Casual listeners could easily mistake many of the pieces for the real thing. The collection includes not only artificial Bach inventions but also works imitating a Beethoven sonata, a Chopin mazurka, a Rachmaninoff suite, Mozart and Stravinsky and a Scott Joplin piano rag. In addition, a new CD of EMI's compositions, called ''Classical Music Composed by Computer'' is being released by Centaur Records. Hofstadter at Stanford University, which included two live concerts of EMI's music. Last weekend, the artificial composer was the focus of a symposium, organized by Dr. ''Nothing I've seen in artificial intelligence has done this so well.'' ''EMI forces us to look at great works of art and wonder where they came from and how deep they really are,'' he said. The cognitive scientist and author Douglas Hofstadter, who presided over the contest at the University of Oregon in Eugene, calls EMI ''the most thought-provoking project in artificial intelligence that I have ever come across.'' The cybernetic pretender, which was invented by David Cope, a composer at the University of California at Santa Cruz, has been upsetting long-held assumptions by people in the music world because of its ability to scan pieces by famous composers, automatically distill some of their essence and then churn out imitations of the work. That people could be duped by a computer program was very disconcerting.'' ''My admiration for his music is deep and cosmic. ''Bach is absolutely one of my favorite composers,'' Dr. But he felt somewhat mollified when the listeners went on to decide that the invention composed by EMI (pronounced ''Emmy'') was genuine Bach. Larson was hurt when the audience concluded that his piece - a simple, engaging form called a two-part invention - was written by the computer. Larson and one by a computer program called EMI, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence.ĭr. Steve Larson, who teaches music theory at the university, listened anxiously while his wife, the pianist Winifred Kerner, performed three entries in the contest - one by Bach, one by Dr. IN a low-key, musical version of the match between Garry Kasparov and the chess-playing machine called Deep Blue, a musician at the University of Oregon competed last month with a computer to compose music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach.