What is it about Beethhoven that makes us want to listen to his work? What about Bach? What is it that makes music itself so enjoyable to listen to? IS it the fact that it has a wondergul rhythm that we can dance to?
There is much debate over this, but overall, I thought that everyone atleast admitted that music was music no matter who made it and that enjoyable music should be heard and shared regaurdlesss of how it was made.
There is a new music album out now that makes us question even this basic idea. This is because music while normally being a medium for creativity. And this artist is a very special artist. This artist is not known for being emotional, nor is this artist known for even being able have emotions.
This artist is Emily Howell, Emily is a new artist on the scene, but she is not criticized on her music capability. No, she is criticized because she happens to be a computer.
David Cope, a professor from the University of California, is the creator and programmer of Emily. When he was asked about computers ability to create he answered," Can computers be creative? In the sense that they are creating something that wasn't there before, yes.. But so can birds and insects and volcanoes. We have reserved this notion of creativity for humans for a long time, and we are enamored of it".
The origins of Emily are fairly interesting. Emily started off as a program that Cope developed in order to help him make his own music. What it does is analyze the styles of other sources of music, and learns some basic music styles, and then combines them to form its own musical style.
He gave Emily a human name because he wanted people to think of It without any
sort of bias based on it being a computer and from the results that he got, it was made quite obvious that once they were told that Emily was a computer, their enthusiasm for the music began to fade away.
The primary source for the dislike of Emily comes from composers that are threatened by this. Seeing a sort of replacement. A new rival to their own jobs that is not even human.
I don't see a threat here, I only see a new musical tool. When musicians started using computers in the recording studio, there was no outcry like this. This is a machine and cannot take away real emotional content, that is something that only something living can do, I think we could use technology to extend our own musical endeavors just as we do with any other place that a machine was put into place.
In fact, i think one of the best things about this, is that we have a music artist from this century that wont be caught in some scandal and clogging up our news with celebrity gossip.
For links to other articles I've written
http://rlwoodsiii.blogspot.com/For the original article about it
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/hot-cla...