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Virtual Music: Computer Synthesis of Musical Style (Mit Press) Paperback – Illustrated, January 30, 2004
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The book is divided into four parts. The first part provides a historical background to Experiments in Musical Intelligence, including examples of historical antecedents, followed by an overview of the program by Douglas Hofstadter. The second part follows the composition of an Experiments in Musical Intelligence work, from the creation of a database to the completion of a new work in the style of Mozart. It includes, in sophisticated lay terms, relatively detailed explanations of how each step in the process contributes to the final composition. The third part consists of perspectives and analyses by Jonathan Berger, Daniel Dennett, Bernard Greenberg, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Steve Larson, and Eleanor Selfridge-Field. The fourth part presents the author's responses to these commentaries, as well as his thoughts on the implications of artificial creativity.
The book (and corresponding Web site) includes an appendix providing extended musical examples referred to and discussed in the book, including composers such as Scarlatti, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Debussy, Bartok, and others. It is also accompanied by a CD containing performances of the music in the text.
- Print length580 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherMIT Press
- Publication dateJanuary 30, 2004
- Dimensions7.5 x 1.45 x 9.25 inches
- ISBN-100262532611
- ISBN-13978-0262532617
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- Publisher : MIT Press (January 30, 2004)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 580 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0262532611
- ISBN-13 : 978-0262532617
- Item Weight : 13 ounces
- Dimensions : 7.5 x 1.45 x 9.25 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #3,248,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,164 in Mystery Writing Reference
- #6,459 in Travel Writing Reference
- #14,945 in Computer Science (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
As an author I have written over 100 published books on a variety of subjects including classical music, avant-garde music, and especially computer composition. I have also written 25 novels, many books of poetry, plays, 20 books on my art, and a variety of over 220 short stories. My books on board games (including one on several variants on chess) and the basics of music as well as three autobiographies called Tinman, Tinman too, and Tinman Tre have all done well. My list of scores (both those composed by my computer programs Emmy and Emily Howell and original works) list in the 100s. My works are also available on CDs such as Beethoven Symphony No. 10, Vivaldi Zodiac, Well Programmed Clavier, Emmy Compilations I and II, Variations on a Theme by Emily Howell, Violin/Viola Concertos, Ballet Antigone, hommage RFK, Classical Music Composed by Computer: Experiments in Musical Intelligence, Complete String Quartets (6), Symphonies 1-6, Piano Etudes, Wonderland, Concerto for Orchestra, A Children's Tale and many, many others.
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The author characterizes `virtual music' as being a category of machine-created composition that attempts to replicate the style of existing music. He points out that virtual music has predated the advent of computing machines, but that these machines have allowed, at a much larger scale, the composition of music in a pre-selected style. Early instances of virtual music discussed in the book include the `figured bass' of the Baroque period, wherein composers could produce music that adhered to a particular composer style but would still be original. Another (fascinating) example is the `Musikalisches Wurfelspiel', or "musical dice game" of the eighteenth-century. To obtain a composition, one constructs a matrix, with rows representing the results of the throw of dice, and the columns representing successive measures of music. To get a measure of music, the dice are tossed, and from the result in the correct row the measure is obtained from the column. Also mentioned is the work of Iannis Xenadis, which uses mathematical models to compose music, and the work of Kemal Ebcioglu, which uses first-order predicate calculus to create chorales in the style of J.S. Bach. In addition, the author mentions the work of Dominik Hornel and Wolfram Menzel, who make use of neural networks to create music with stylistic similarities to composers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
Early in the book, the author introduces what he calls "The Game" in order to warm the reader up to his study of virtual music. This game requires the reader to identify styles and composers of various examples of music, the notations of which are included in the book, and the actual music on the accompanying book. One of the objects of "The Game" is to be able to distinguish human-composed music from machine-composed music. Another goal of "The Game" is to determine not only which works are human-composed but also which ones (they are chorales) best follow the style of J.S. Bach. The third goal is to see whether four mazurkas are really in the style of Frederic Chopin. Players are scored according to their answers, and the author quotes a statistic with large groups of listeners between 40 and 60 percent on the average. The author notes that experts in musicology have failed to recognize many of the machine music examples.
For the philosophy-oriented reader, a debate between Douglas Hofstadter and the author is included in the book. It is the opinion of this reviewer that such debates do not add too much to the field of artificial intelligence, and that those who are involved in this field should declare a moratorium on philosophical debate, and instead spend their time on creating better thinking machines. Philosophical debate is best left to those who like to indulge in it: the philosophers. There are many like Hofstadter who do not want to accept the musical creativity and abilities of the machines. Convincing these individuals of these abilities is typically difficult, and requires large expenditures of time. This time is better spent on the development of more sophisticated musical machines.
There are many interesting discussions in this book, too many to be reviewed here in the space allotted. One of the most fascinating of all the topics is the author's discussion on musical patterns. He believes these patterns are critical to the recognition of musical style, and therefore designates these patterns as "signatures". These signatures are contiguous note patterns that recur in at least two works of the works of a composer, and are found by using pattern-matching algorithms from artificial intelligence. Interesting in this context is the use of what the author calls "controllers", which allow variations of patterns to count as matches. As the name implies, these controllers may be set by users or by the machine itself.
Besides signatures, "earmarks" are another device used by the author to do pattern-matching in musical compositions. Earmarks are a kind of measure of the "inevitability" in some musical works. The machines analyze the music in their databases for earmarks and then make sure that these are not placed in inappropriate locations in the scores or omitted entirely. The author views them as "principles rather than data", and so a pattern-matching algorithm that finds them must return an "abstraction" representing the type of material used rather than actual musical events. Detecting earmarks can be very difficult says the author. More research is needed.