Computer program writing great, original works of classical music

Halfway down are two little 'click to play' boxes that claim to be Bach like. I'm no virtuoso, but I can play the piano a little bit and that stuff sounds so mechanistic to me it's not even funny. The first impression you get is of a very bad player piano roll (the caption says the 'tinny' sound is because of the MIDI, but that's not what I'm getting at, it's the totally 'dead' delivery, like a corpse playing the piano). And that's just the first bit, the compositions are absolutely boring, even the simplest piece from 'das Notenbuchlein' blows this away.<p>Glenn Gould and Dinu Lipatti are turning over in their respective graves, Bach himself is positively spinning.<p>If 'most people' really can't tell the difference between that music and the real thing it is sad.<p>I don't doubt that in the future we'll reach a point where computers will compose music on par with human composers but these two samples leave me underwhelmed. I think the proper thing to do here is to appreciate the fact that the pig can dance at all but to my ears it is just painful.

No it isn't. What an absolutely ridiculous claim. The two "Bach-like" pieces are rubbish, full of strange discontinuities and random meanderings, not to mention the rhythm just hammering away in a very set pattern. Reminds me of terrible beginning piano workbook pieces, only less musical.<p>On the next page, the other "fugue" does bizarre things that I don't think a human composer would. The beginning is entirely discontinuous, and doesn't really sound like a beginning. A real fugue isn't just something being played repeatedly in different intervals.<p>If that's the best that the program has to offer, then I'm not sure what it's accomplished. Just because it can combine complicated things doesn't mean its composed anything, because it doesn't understand the parts. If someone copied and pasted parts of great books, and then tried to weave the parts together, would the result be any good? Or even great books by the same author. Maybe that's a weak analogy though.<p>I feel sorry for the Slate writer if he can't tell the difference between the Bach and this noise, he's seriously missing out.

"Audiences have been moved to tears by melodies created by algorithms."<p>This can be read two ways...

This is music sort of like the writing you get from a Markov text generator. Except much better. Has anyone gotten any good thoughts or ideas from a Markov text generator? And that illuminates something about music: the patterns aren't as complex as language.<p>This is going to cause a giant re-ranking of composers, as those whose music seems most like computer-generated stuff will seem less impressive now. (That will be wrong, but it's what people will think anyway.) Interestingly, the ones who create the noisiest stuff will benefit the most, whereas those whose compositions are perfectly expressed in the linear notation of sheet music will lose out. Ramones in, Beethoven down, Rachmaninoff out.

This technology would be great for amateur filmmakers, especially those who aren't skilled musicians. Imagine a UI with sliders to create the desired mood, tempo, emotion, etc. Maybe the result isn't a John Williams score, but it sounds professional, is easy to produce, and is royalty free.<p>I suppose the drawback is if the software is easily accessible, and everyone uses similar databases of sources, the compositions could all start to sound alike.

The MIDI samples were a really poor choice to introduce the program's compositions, but those snippets do sound a lot like Bach chorales stylistically, perhaps at the level a competent (if uninspiring) student of harmony.<p>The chorales exist online in machine-readable formats at <a href="http://www.jsbchorales.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.jsbchorales.net/</a> (a great resource for doing comprehensive analysis on chorale harmony -- wouldn't doubt if the same data served as input for the Emmy program).

Another article on Cope, with a Hofstadter cameo and non-MIDI samples: <a href="http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/" rel="nofollow">http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-...</a>

No sense of timing or rhythm. Even an algorithm that adds a random delay to notes would make it sound more natural. I listened to previews of the album on iTunes and it sounds like crap.

So when can I d/l a GPL music generator so I can generate billions of hours of music in the background.