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movements by encoding them algorithmically and playing out their consequences.
Insights from these approaches can aid us to better understand the mechanisms un-
derlying these trends, potentially illuminating a class of valid compositions that can
fall within the bounds of (say) a fugue or chorale.
7.3.7 Authorship
Tyrell
: “More human than human” is our motto.
-(
Blade Runner, 1982
)
Collaborations with computational systems raise the issue of contribution toward
and ownership of outcomes: when we replace parts of the creative process with an
automated system, are we somehow dehumanising the resulting art object? Sec-
ondly, if such a system has been produced by another software designer, are we
being invisibly driven by the tacit strategies and methods that have been encoded
into the tool by their authorship? Finally, is it even
possible
to produce “creative”
tools, and does it matter?
The “Inhuman” Argument
If we accept that the output of a human-machine
symbiosis will exhibit characteristics of both, it is frequently argued that we are
introducing something (unfavourably) inhuman to a realm that is quintessentially
human. At least as early as 1987, Charles Ames describes a “virulent” (Ames
1987
,
p. 1) resistance to the uptake of computer-aided composition on this basis.
We suggest that there are actually three underlying roots to this objection:
•
that we are (knowingly or otherwise) cheating, by letting the tools do the work;
•
that we are (presumably unknowingly) being directed by our tools into particular
modes of operation;
•
that recourse to reason alone has no place in musical composition in any case, a
realm which should be driven by intuition, feeling, narrative, suffering, or other
non-algorithmic concerns.
The last of these objections has been somewhat defunct in the world of avant-
garde composition since Serialism or before. Barbaud (Ames
1987
) responds with
an elegant rejoinder:
Music is generally called 'human' when it considers temporary or inherent tendencies of the
mind, of part or all of a composer's personality. Such music is based on feeling and since
it turns its back, in a sense, on pure knowledge, it might rather be called 'inhuman', for it
celebrates what we have in common with all the animals rather than with what is individual
to man: his reason. Algorithmic music is thus 'inhuman' only in one sense of the word, it is
'human' in as much as it is the product of rational beings. (Ames
1987
, p. 173)
Similarly, in Nietzsche's comment on the typewriter “working on our thoughts”,
we are tempted to detect a certain pejorative tone in his voice: surrendering parts of
our agency to technological devices, so the argument might go, means diluting our
creative purity through the hidden bias effects of our supposedly passive tools.
