| While I’m quite happy with the study of synthetic creativity, what I don’t understand is why you would want autonomous systems to write music.
What is the purpose of it?
As a musician (of sorts) I can well understand systems to help me write or perform music, but why I would want a system to relieve me of my need to be creative I do not understand. If all I want is music to listen to, there’s lots of it available (and that’s a different problem, also causing pain to lots of performing musicians).
Or is it for autonomous synthetic listeners to listen to? That would be quite interesting: autonomous systems creating music, being listened to by an autonomous synthetic audience. You wouldn’t even need to actually play it, or even to convert it from digital to analog: it could be directly piped digitally from the synthetic composer to the synthetic audience, thus removing any requirement for human participation at all.
Yours (not too seriously)
Leslie Smith
I understand your concerns about creative music systems, but saying that "most certainly there are NO computer systems capable of generating music" is simply not true. If you are interested in the topic, the survey by Fernandez and Vico (2013) offers a quick review of hundreds of systems capable of generating music. As you might discover while reading the paper, algorithmic composition has a quite long history. The first creative music systems appeared in the late fifties. Today, automatic generation of music is a topic of interest in the most prestigious conferences on Artificial Intelligence (e.g., AAAI, ECAI).
Algorithmic composition is but a subfield of Computational Creativity (CC) – the art and science of developing systems that are able to generate human-like creative artefacts such as painting, music and poetry. CC is a growing field with a large research community. Have a look at the Prosecco website if you want to know more (http://prosecco-network.eu/).
I might be wrong, but the scepticism around computer creative systems resembles the scepticism around chess programmes 30 years ago. But then Deep Blue came…
Fernández, J. D., & Vico, F. (2013). AI methods in algorithmic composition: A comprehensive survey. Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 513-582. https://goo.gl/xepRmf
b/w
Valerio
Leslie Smith Professor of Computing, Computing Science and Mathematics, University of Stirling Stirling FK9 4LA, Scotland, UK +44 (0) 1786 467435
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