A.I. Makes Music

I saw this short but great segment on CNN last month about David Cope, a professor of Music at UC Santa Barbara. He spent 7 years to write 20,000 lines of code that uses A.I. to create musical composures based on the styles of others. Some people have been having problems with computers generating music that's actually artful, as it symbolizes a revered area of "human only" that is being ceded to computers.

The video is only viewable via CNN's Pipeline, which is a subscription service, but you can read more about him in the following Wired article:

"The houselights darken, and a half-dozen musicians dressed in black take the stage with violins, a viola, a violone, and a violoncello. A woman sits down at the harpsichord; another tunes a lutelike instrument called a theorbo. The audience hushes, and the ensemble begins: A single, piercing violin races through Vivaldi-esque arpeggios while the rest of the strings measure out a deep, deliberate complement. The second movement is different – slower, sadder, carried along by mournful viola. During moments of quiet beauty or apparent emotion, it is jarring to consider what the music means to Emmy – numbers, built on patterns, built on a database of more numbers."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/posts.html?pg=3