Meet Emily Howell, Artificial Composer
Posted by Gabriella_Mangino on Friday, Feb 26, 2010
Alright, Emily Howell could be anyone—that girl you sat next to in second grade, that girl you used to work with, that girl you sat next to on the train today. That’s what musician/programmer David Cope wanted you to think when you saw her name. But she isn’t human in the least bit.
Emily’s just a really good computer program. She can make music that sounds like Bach and Haydn. Why is this interesting? We have robots that can breakdance and Sumo wrestle course, a computer program can make classical music. And who needs that when we’ve got Lil Wayne?
But this is way cooler, Emily has been programmed to have “creativity,” and she’s making music that confuses anyone familiar with the Turing test —you know, the one that’s meant to determine when we’ve achieved artificial intelligence. Just listen.
Cope has always tried to make music that would change people’s lives. After twenty years of trying the old fashioned way—you know, drafting out music by hand, experimenting with keys on the piano—he got frustrated. So he combined his undying affection for music with some basic programming classes. And Emily’s mom, EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) or Emmy, was born.
She had a huge musical database. Cope could press a button, walk away, and Emmy would produce 5,000 chorales. But as a music composing program she failed to impress, her compositions were simply regurgitations of those old pieces by dead guys.
So Cope started over. Now he and Emily work in conversation. She produces, he gives feedback, and she builds an “association network” of good notes and musical statements—ultimately resulting in her own style (crafted by Cope). Most people who hear her songs have no idea she’s a computer, one guy compared her style to Stravinsky. The girl has even got a secret record deal.
But other people just can’t get past the whole creative computer composer thing. Cope just thinks they’re biased, a result of “the mere fact that when we like the taste of something we tend to eat it more than we should." As he told an interviewer, "We have our physical body telling us things, and we can’t intellectually govern it the way we’d like to.” So the question for him “isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”
It’s an interesting twist for the future of music—with humans already making a bunch of music that sounds like it got churned out of a machine, are computer programs like Emily going to start putting us to shame?
Photo by Catherine Karnow via Miller McCuneFiled under:
About the author
Sometimes the world has a load of questions (me too). gabriella@motherboard.tv
