Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
music composition within the computing community, leading to the es-
tablishment in Urbana of one of the world's first electronic music studios.
Many of the most prominent researchers in this field cut their teeth un-
der Hiller's tutelage but, as a lover of classical music, I feel that almost
none of their output would find favour with the audiences in the world's
leading concert halls.
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In 1984 Kemal Ebcioglu extended the approach of Klein and Bolitho
by developing a successful rule-based system for composing chorales in
the style of Johann Sebastian Bach. Ebcioglu's program was based on
some 350 rules, rather more than the six used to create “Push But-
ton Bertha” almost 30 years earlier, and these rules were augmented by
Schenkerian analysis
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on Bach's procedures for harmonizing chorales.
The results were far nearer to the level of musicality that one expects
to hear in the concert hall than was anything previously composed by
a computer system. Ebcioglu's work was a landmark in computer com-
position, but his computing interests moved away from music almost
immediately thereafter. Fortunately the baton of stylistic imitation had
already been taken up by David Cope, whose work has dominated the
field since 1987.
David Cope
On 5 April 1997 a most unusual performance took place as part of the
University of California's “April in Santa Cruz” music festival. The high-
light of the concert was a performance of Mozart's 42
nd
symphony, a
work that incorporates all the glorious features that music lovers expect
from a Mozart symphony, especially his later ones such as its predeces-
sor, the 41
st
, which Mozart called “Jupiter” and which he composed in
1788. What was so remarkable about the Santa Cruz concert was that
Mozart's 42
nd
symphony was composed more than 200 years after the
Jupiter. Its composer was a program called EMI,
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running on an Apple
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This is, of course, a somewhat subjective opinion. But although I have heard only a very small
proportion of the work of what might be called the “Hiller school of computer music composition”,
none of it appealed to me in the slightest, and I cannot imagine anything similar appealing to a wide
audience of regular classical music concert goers.
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The Polish-born music theorist Heinrich Schenker was a pupil of Anton Bruckner. Schenkerian
analysis explains how music is made up of a series of common melodic fragments and operates by
reducing a piece of music from the detail of its surface to a few simple fragments that lie far below its
surface, resulting in what Schenker called a background—a few simple progressions that span and
define the entire work.
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Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
