Robotics Reference
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...a shockingcomeuppance. They sounded eerily Chopin-like to
me—and I'm someone who feels sure that music is a soul-to-soul
communication. I think works of art tell you something very cen-
tral and deep about their creator. How could emotional music be
coming out of a program that has never heard a note, never lived a
moment of life? [9]
So impressed was Hofstadter at the resemblance to Chopin's style of
EMI's mazurkas that he took the program to the Eastman School of Mu-
sic at the University of Rochester, widely regarded as one of America's
leading music schools, where he witnessed more than half of the acad-
emic staff vote for one of EMI's mazurkas as genuine Chopin, while a
truly genuine but rather little-known mazurka was voted to be a com-
puter composition.
How Does EMI Work?
Cope's basic assumption is that “The genius of great composers lies not in
inventing previously unimagined music but in their ability to effectively
reorder and refine what already exists”. [9] This is a statement with which
I disagree, as it belittles the craft of the composer in creating previously
unheard melodies, phrasings and orchestrations, etc. But the topic of
human genius goes well beyond the scope of this topic and I am happy
to accept that that this is Cope's view and the assumption underlying
much of his work. In fact I suspect that Cope's “error” (as I see it) has
been very much to the benefit of his research—without such a strong
belief in this statement it is doubtful whether he would have achieved
such phenomenal success in his design and development of EMI.
EMI's design is based on the analysis of the structure of all the music
presented to the system, for example all the symphonies of Mozart or all
the mazurkas of Chopin. The system extracts from this data important
elements of a composer's style and then recombines some of the musical
elements of that style with some of the composer's recognizable musical
structures, thereby creating new compositions in the same style as the
original composer. For EMI's purposes, “style” means those identifiable
characteristics of a composer's music that are recognisably similar from
one work to another, including the pitch and duration of the notes and
their timbre. 27 The musical logic is programmed partly as strict struc-
27 Timbre is the quality of a musical note which distinguishes different types of musical instru-
ment.
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