Robotics Reference
In-Depth Information
cause of his suicide in 1954, when he ate an apple soaked in potassium
cyanide.
Creativity
The earliest examples of artificial creativity came in the field of music
composition.
Kircher's Device
In
Musurgia Universalis
, an encyclopaedic scientific work published in
Rome in 1650, the famous German Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher
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provided two illustrations of his
Arca Musurgia
, a device by which a non-
musician could compose a chorale, for four voices, by selecting at random
prearranged musical fragments that were inscribed as tables on wooden
strips.
The
Arca Musurgica
comprised a wooden box with several compart-
ments housing wooden strips, each strip being inscribed on its top and
bottom face as seen from the example strip in Figure 12.
Examining one of these strips provides an illustration of Kircher's
method for the automatic composition of music. The wording at the top
of the strip is
“Iambica Euripedaea”
, which indicates that this particular
strip is for composing a chorale in which each line contains six syllables.
An example of this type of chorale is
Ave maris stella
DEI Mater alma,
Atque semper Virgo
Felix coeli porta.
The roman numerals on the strip indicate possible differences in the
character of the chorale (reverent, joyful, sorrowful, anguished), with the
key of the composition being determined according to the character of
the song.
Next there are six tables, each containing four rows with six numbers
per row. Each number stands for a musical note. The number 1 denotes
the keynote; the number 2 denotes the following note, and so on.
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Kircher's (1602-1680) oeuvre extended to some 44 books and more than 2,000 letters that are
nowintheVaticanMuseuminRome.
