Key Of Grey

Photo courtesy of Brocco Lee

February 26th, 2010 – With the strong growth in the population of DIY electronic wizards, it seems like almost everyday there’s a new robot that can play music. Such roboticized musicians have served as more of a curiosity than anything; musicians haven’t been threatened by robots taking their jobs just yet.

So why is it that when Dave Cope unveiled Emmy, there were plenty of angry detractors, and even supporters were disturbed by the implications. Emmy (or EMI as she’s officially known), was a piece of software written by Dave Cole back in the early 1980′s. Emmy was designed to compose music. By analyzing famous works by classical composers like Bach, the software sought to create music based upon rules and conventions that it found similar between compositions.

Composing like this is nothing fancy. When I was studying classical music in school, we were taught to compose using certain conventions. Emmy did essentially the same thing, but by figuring out the conventions for herself. The problem with music that’s created this way, is that it sounds incredibly derivative and unimaginative, something that Dave Cope realized right away.

So he went about improving Emmy so that she could make aesthetic decisions. Note that this is very different from much of the generative music applications right now that create music by randomization and evolution. Emmy took large, varying amounts of data, creating algorithms based upon that information, made autonomous aesthetic decisions, and then composed music.

The implications of Dave Cope’s research went well beyond music. In fact, the financial sector was very interested in using his technology to gain better insight into the markets. Of course, what makes Dave Cope’s work so infuriating to critics, is that Emmy was good at composing music. In fact, the music she came out with passed the Turing Test. No one could tell that the compositions were made by a computer program and not by a human.

This subject gets a lot of people understandably upset. If creativity can be mimicked (and in a much faster time) by a piece of software, then what makes us special? Dave Cope posits that our creativity comes from all the experience that comes before us. Either using, or breaking away from, what has come before means we unconsciously perform the same algorithms that Emmy did, but much slower. How long did it take you to write your last short piano piece? Hours, weeks, months, years? The first time Cope turned Emmy loose, she had come up with five thousand Bach chorals in the time it took him to get a sandwich for lunch; each one a perfectly formed Bach-style piece.

One of the biggest criticisms that Emmy got was for plagiarism, that the algorithms she used were derivative of real music, so she was doing nothing more than aping. In an effort to prove this wrong, Dave Cope deleted Emmy completely and started from scratch. His new software is proving itself to be even more “creative”, if that’s possible (you can listen to some of its compositions at the link below).

I’m not saying that the music she creates (her name is now Emily Howell, a humanized name that Dave Cope created to irritate his critics) is going to rival the greats, but you’d be hard-pressed to figure out it wasn’t written by a person if you didn’t know. In fact, one critic said he loved the composition when it was performed, but a couple weeks later when he discovered it was written by Emily, his tune quickly changed.

I personally am amazed by what Emily wrote. However, I am unsure of what to think about the whole idea. What really makes us special? I’ll leave you with one more scary tidbit. A pop group has commissioned Dave Cope to use Emily Howell to write songs for their upcoming album. First auto-tune for singers, now Emily Howell for composers. Where do we go from here?

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer via Gizmodo

BBC Contest to figure out Emmy from real composers