Can algorithms create music?

Day 192 / 365

There are many reasons why people are scared of the growing power of machine learning and artificial intelligence, one of which is the concern that computers are going to put a lot (or maybe all?) of us out of jobs. But most would agree that computers will mostly take over the mundane and repetitive jobs. Surely the jobs of the artists and musicians would be safe. Computers can’t be creative right?

David Cope, a musical composer turned computer scientist, was curious about the same question back in the 80s. He studied the field of artificial intelligence and applied it to music. He wrote computer programs that could create compositions which mimicked some of the classical works from the past. He was able to release some of these in the album titled “Bach by design”, Bach, of course, a great composer from the 1700s. This album became quite popular, but it received a lot of criticism from classical music lovers.

One such critic, Professor Steve Larson, ridiculed the compositions, saying that an algorithm would not have the soul to produce music anywhere close to Bach. He put forward a challenge to David. They will arrange for a pianist to do a live performance of three compositions. One would be an original Bach composition, one would be generated by David’s AI and the third would be written by Larson himself. An audience would then be asked to listen to all three and identify which one was the original Bach and which one was computer generated. What do you think the results were?

Well, the audience thought that the AI-generated piece was the real Bach, and they thought that the original Bach was Larson’s. And last but not least, they thought that Larson’s piece was computer generated!

So is anyone's job safe now? I guess only time will tell.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog — The end of an era