Can Traditional Composing Become Obsolete?

Composer David Cope has been creating software for nearly 30 years that helps him write music. When comparing “humanly composed” scores to the code-aided pieces he has made, many cannot discern a difference. So, does that matter?

Slate analyzes the argument with Cope’s software named “Emily Howell,” the successor to an earlier version entitled “Emmy”– for “Experiments in Musical Intelligence.”

“Ms. Howell’s ancestry dates back to 1980, when Cope—by then a successful human composer—hit a brick wall while trying to write an opera. Cope, a genuine polymath with an aptitude for computers, had been playing music his entire life and was respected among modern composers, but around his 40thbirthday his ideas started to dry up. In desperation, he wrote a computer program to generate random melodies and musical ideas.”

At first, the experimental software produced no real homage to harmony or instrumental structure, so be began to analyze how humans composed by creating a database of existing music to mimic memory. Starting from a basis of hundreds of Bach chorales, the software began to sync large amounts of data into smaller passages so that patterns were recognizable.

Seven years after Cope first developed the software in 1980, he was able to complete an opera and by 1992, Emmy had composed 1,500 symphonies, 1,000 piano sonatas and 1,000 string quartets. He explained:

“‘We don’t start with a blank slate,’ he said. ‘In fact, what we do in our brains is take all the music we’ve heard in our life, segregate out what we don’t like, and try to replicate [the music we like] while making it our own.’ What separates great composers from the rest of us, he says, is the ability to accurately compile that database, remember it, and manipulate it into new patterns.”

Visit Slate for musical samples of David Cope and Emmy’s compositions.

Slate: I’ll Be Bach

photo via ruthhb