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An annoymous person wrote in response to my last entry: "So you feel that the harmonic sounds computers are able to compose by following the mathematical rules or parameters set to them by their programmers are not music because the computers themselves are not aware of the different forms of music?That's a little like saying that given a monkey, a typewriter and an infinite length of time, the monkey will never be able to compose a Shakespearean play because it is not aware of the rules of grammar or the meaning behind figurative language..."
I think this is a very good criticism. I did not consider to what extend would randomness exclude music, and what not, for, given a computer that "composes" according to mathematical rules or parameters set by programmers, the combination that comes out of this program it is by my definition music. Form is indeed inherent within the piece of music. So, the monkey that, at the end of eternity, finally wrote Hamlet, that I must consider it as great as Shakespeare's Hamlet.
This, I must point out, is true only if we consider reader/listener response. This, in fact, is a tremendously post-modern position. This takes away authorial intention, as the reader/listener constructs all the meaning of a text/sound. For many, this is very liberating. Freud, for example, would have a ground for applying the Oedipus Complex on Hamlet (although, of course, it is possible that Shakespeare actually meant that...).
I am a humanist at heart (even if those disgusting post-colonial critics would call my values to be "white-male-middle class values"), so I certainly would not like a piece of music in which I listen to to be a work that is randomly generated, like the Monkey version of Hamlet. What I grasped as human beauty, I most definitely wish it to be human generated. Better to have one Beethoven who went through the entire creative process, tremendously affected by physical, social, cultural suffering to produce one Grosse Fuge, then one hundred computers to generate hundred thousand more of the same music.
Computer generated music - yes, it is music, but music that has no significant for the humanist me.
I think this is a very good criticism. I did not consider to what extend would randomness exclude music, and what not, for, given a computer that "composes" according to mathematical rules or parameters set by programmers, the combination that comes out of this program it is by my definition music. Form is indeed inherent within the piece of music. So, the monkey that, at the end of eternity, finally wrote Hamlet, that I must consider it as great as Shakespeare's Hamlet.
This, I must point out, is true only if we consider reader/listener response. This, in fact, is a tremendously post-modern position. This takes away authorial intention, as the reader/listener constructs all the meaning of a text/sound. For many, this is very liberating. Freud, for example, would have a ground for applying the Oedipus Complex on Hamlet (although, of course, it is possible that Shakespeare actually meant that...).
I am a humanist at heart (even if those disgusting post-colonial critics would call my values to be "white-male-middle class values"), so I certainly would not like a piece of music in which I listen to to be a work that is randomly generated, like the Monkey version of Hamlet. What I grasped as human beauty, I most definitely wish it to be human generated. Better to have one Beethoven who went through the entire creative process, tremendously affected by physical, social, cultural suffering to produce one Grosse Fuge, then one hundred computers to generate hundred thousand more of the same music.
Computer generated music - yes, it is music, but music that has no significant for the humanist me.
posted by Tristan at 11:38 a.m.
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