On Wed, May 26, 2010 at 5:35 PM, Charles Henry <czhenry@email-addr-hidden> wrote:
> The degree to which computers can
> compose music depends on the success of modeling musical experience in
> humans.
I'm willing to grant you the benefit of the doubt with regards this claim,
because I suspect you mean it in a different way than you wrote it. I don't
think that having a model of human musical experience is at all a necessary
component of computer composition, just as it isn't for human composition. I
feel that this can be said with some confidence given the fact that
*different* humans have wildly different musical experiences when presented
with the same material. There is no comprehensive model of human musical
experience, because there is no comprehensive human musical experience.
As musicians and composers, we approach the "tiling problem"
> with a set of techniques, instruments, and vocabulary. We are able to
> get direct, immediate feedback on the effectiveness of a giving
> tiling, which computers, at present, cannot.
Not sure about this either. Its only been in the very recent past that human
composers could compose anything for an ensemble and get "direct immediate
feedback" on the effectiveness. In fact, a lot of the skill of the composers
of western classical music from the baroque era on seem to hinge on their
ability to *imagine* what the composition would sound like rather than have
any "direct, immediate feedback" on their ideas.
>
> The point I'm getting at: the structure isn't in the music itself,
> it's in the mind of the listener.
>
I'm with you 100% here. For years I've been trying to figure out what the
music I like all has in common. There must be something, some common
experience i told myself. I *must* be able to find it. Its only been in the
last couple of years that I've realized I had this ass backwards. All the
music I like has one and only one thing in common: me. I, the humble
listener, am the thing that unites the bach cello suites with steve roach
with touamani diabate with shawn lane with steve reich with the cinematic
orchestra with interpol (to name just a few). not the music, not the
"structure". the listener is at the center of it all, and each listener is a
different locus where some kind of rorschach-like experience takes places
uniting musical experiences in unpredictable and, I suspect, utterly
un-musical ways.
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Received on Thu May 27 04:15:01 2010
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