Computerized Artistic Creativity?

[lpetrich]

In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter wrote the book Gödel Escher Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid, discussing a variety of topics, like Kurt Goedel's Incompleteness Theorems. Among them was the prospects for artificial intelligence, complete with "Ten Questions and Speculations". They include:

Question: Will a computer program ever write beautiful music?

Speculation: Yes, but not soon. Music is a language of emotions, and until programs have emotions as complex as ours, there is no way a program will write anything beautiful. There can be "forgeries” shallow imitations of the syntax of earlier music but despite what one might think at first, there is much more to musical expression than can be captured in syntactical rules. There will be no new kinds of beauty turned up for a long time by computer music-composing programs. Let me carry this thought a little further. To think-and I have heard this suggested-that we might soon be able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile circuitry pieces which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit. A "program" which could produce music as they did would have to wander around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life and feeling every moment of it. It would have to understand the joy and loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the inaccessibility of a distant town, the heartbreak and regeneration after a human death. It would have to have known resignation and worldweariness, grief and despair, determination and victory, piety and awe. In it would have had to commingle such opposites as hope and fear, anguish and jubilation, serenity and suspense. Part and parcel of it would have to be a sense of grace, humor, rhythm, a sense of the unexpected-and of course an exquisite awareness of the magic of fresh creation. Therein, and therein only, lie the sources of meaning in music.

I'm quoting at length because I could not think of a good way of trimming it down. DH seems to be arguing that for that to happen:

• The software must experience the emotions that we do
• The software must do so when given music in audio-data form.

That's a rather tall order, and DH seems very dismissive of attempts to fake it. But I think that it would be possible to do so by trying out various possibilities and noting what responses they provoke in human listeners.

The same can be said of other sorts of artistic creativity, I think.

 

[James Brown]

Sounds doable for Machine Learning. Have computers generate music following some basic rules (chords, key changes, etc.), then have people rank the music. Over time, the computers should be able to discover, Darwinian-style, the sort of music that works, and create more like it.

 

[steve_bank]

How does the computer know what 'sounds good'?

There are mechanistic techniques used going far back in the history of music by composers. There are general rules to compost ion.

 

[lpetrich]

How does the computer know what 'sounds good'?

Douglas Hofstadter seemed to argue that the only way that it can do that if it implements human music-to-emotions.

But I and others here have proposed an alternative: find out from human listeners what sounds good and what doesn't.

 

[none]

do computers fall in love? should they?

 

[steve_bank]

Good is in the ear of the listener. Unless an analog to the human brain is crated that goes through life experiences a computer figuring out what good sounds are can only do so in terms of human parents in the system. Music becomes art when it communicates human feelings and experience. Without that it is just sounds. An electronic computer can say 'I hurt' if sensors detect it being struck above a level of force, but it can not experience emotional and physical human pain.

And of course that will lead some to argue that pain is just a physical human response on the brain implying we are just a computer of sorts. Pain drives creativity. Poe, Jim Morrison, many of the old Jazz greats. War inspires human creativity. What would inspire a computer algorithm to compose a song with a certain emotional content?

When I listen to Bach or Stevie Wonder or the Grateful Dead I do not just hear pleasing or interesting combinations of sound. Why does a minor and major chord on a piano 'feel' differently emotionally? Would an upbeat 4/4 time spmg be appropriate for a funeral? A funeral dirge would emotionally dampen a party because of what it evokes.

If you are old enough to remember the music promoter Phil Spector from the 50s-60s. He analyzed the underling rhythms and so on from music that sold. He then hired composers to create songs based on the analysis. Then he hired random musicians to record. He had a long series of 'one hit wonders'. Songs at the top of the chart played by an unknown group heard only once.

That technique led to disco. The term became formula music. Today the endless stream of rap music.

 

[WAB]

Do androids dream of electric sheep?

Oh, by the way, excellent points, Steve.

Another by the way: I believe there are several compositions by computers available to hear on Youtube and such sites. Some are quite intriguing, but I never heard anything that moved me like say, Brahms or Mahler, Black Sabbath, or Buckethead, etc...