Computer-generated music

 

Computer-generated music

01 December 2006

Writer's block. Every composer knows its dull, frustrating pain. But David Cope has developed a way to sidestep it.

An especially bad case of creative obstruction hit Cope in the early 1980s. He was in the midst of composing his first opera Cradle Falling and he simply couldn't figure out how to proceed. 'I had absolutely no inspiration whatsoever,' he recalls. Yet he had accepted a commission fee and there was no way to renege.

So Cope moved his chair from his piano to his computer, returning to a composition program he'd begun writing a few years earlier, Experiments in Musical Intelligence (or Emmy, for short).

Its guiding principle? 'Nothing is 100 per cent original,' Cope explains. 'There's always a tendency to be re-combinatory. Music doesn't just come out of thin air. There's a source for every single note.' His first mission was to train Emmy in the style of Bach, creating a database of existing works from which the computer could extrapolate 'new' Bach Chorales. Hundreds of them remain available on his website. 'They're vanilla, first-year-exercise types of pieces,' Cope says.

Cope enriched his programming abilities with courses in Artificial Intelligence, and began entering other composers into Emmy's database, including Brahms, Mozart, and Chopin. 'In some pieces, it's impossible to make associations,' Cope says. 'In others, you can hear little snippets and reminiscences.'

'They weren't forbidden so much as impossible'

The process only worked for composers whose style was fairly consistent. Vivaldi was surprisingly difficult on that account, as was Beethoven. Contemporary music and popular music were also out of the question. Both are too unpredictable with variables like lyrics, voice quality, and legal teams. 'They weren't forbidden so much as impossible,' Cope says. 'And I didn't want to be the one who discovers whether style is copyrightable.'

But Emmy worked quite well for everything else, and suddenly Cope had a whole body of 'new' works by famous, long-dead composers. He called them 'historical compositions.' Some of them received performances at the Santa Cruz Baroque Festival.

Linda Burman-Hall, an ethnomusicologist specialising in early keyboard literature, was among the first to perform the music. 'Without making the commitment to perform, taking the leap of faith to interpret, new works by computer cannot be received and understood,' she says. 'Even the famous original composers' scores sound lacklustre in synthesizer performance, and would be judged inadequate. My job was to find a way to believe the score, and to perform it as if it were by a human composer.'

Eventually, still needing to complete that opera, Cope threw his own music into the mix. Soon enough, Emmy was producing music à la Cope, drawing not only on his previous work but on that of all his major stylistic predecessors as well. He imagined some part of Emmy's output would strike his fancy, thereby sparking his inspiration once again. 'It had to have some relationship to what I was already doing,' he says. 'I was hoping it would be a kind of teaser for me, something to spur me on.'

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