Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI) extends the concepts presented in David Cope’s previous book Computers and Musical Style (volume 6 in this series). Experiments in Musical Intelligence describes the basic principles of analysis, pattern matching, object orientation, and natural language processing that are incorporated in the author’s well- known EMI project. Cope’s system makes it possible to generate new compositions in the styles of various composers, from Bach and Mozart to Prokofiev and Scott Joplin. The accompanying CD-ROM contains the code and documentation for the program SARA (Simple Analytic Recombinant Algorithm), which produces new compositions in the style of the music in its database.
• Background and Overview • The Analysis Component. • The Pattern-Matching Component • The Object System • The ATN Component • An Application- Level Program and Sample Output • Conclusions and the Future
In twenty years of working in artificial intelligence, I have run across nothing more thought-provoking than David Cope’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence. What is the essence of musical style, indeed of music itself? Can great new music emerge from the extraction and recombination of patterns in earlier music? Are the deepest of human emotions triggerable by computed patterns of notes?
Despite the fact that Cope’s vision of human creativity is radically different from my own, I admire enormously what he has achieved. Indeed, this lovingly written book about a deeply held vision of musical creativity should, I think, earn its place as one of the most significant adventures of the late twentieth century.
Douglas Hofstadter, author of Godel, Escher, Bach and
Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies
David Cope is a composer and professor of music at the University'
of California Santa Cruz In addition to writing three books and numerous
articles on music composition, he has composed seventy of his own works,
which have been published and performed extensively in the United States
and abroad.
VOLUME 12 THE COMPUTER MUSIC AND DIGITAL AUDIO $49.95. ISBN
0-89579-337-7
Copyright © 1995, 1997 MIDI Classics®. Revised June 3, 198