[Smt-talk] Aesthetics of Computer-Generated Music
Victor grauer
victorag at verizon.net
Thu Apr 7 07:31:35 PDT 2011
At 03:56 PM 4/6/2011, matralab wrote:
>I would be especially interested in [double-]blind studies where
>listeners were asked to rate "meaningfulness"
>or emotional richness of music that was a) either composed with an
>intent to convey emotion or b) fully generated by computer.
I seriously doubt you could ever find anything belonging to category
b. Nothing, not even the most abstrusely mathematical computer
program, is ever "fully generated" by computer. Maybe someday we'll
have computers with minds and wills of their own, but not yet. The
computer is always used as a tool, even when the result is fully
determined by an algorithm. Also it's important to understand that
you don't need a computer to generate algorithmic music. "Play the C
major scale 100 times, each time inserting a single note foreign to
that scale" is an algorithm.
Some composers like to use the computer to generate music that sounds
completely impersonal and unemotional, but that's their preference,
not the computer's. In my own case, I employ a process I call
"tuning." I start with an algorithm that seems promising, I listen to
the result, and then modify it over and over again until I get
something that "speaks" to me. I am completely involved aesthetically
in the composition of such works. The computer/synthesizer is simply
a handy tool with infinite patience and very powerful capabilities as
a performer.
I have a feeling many composers of computer music work in more or
less the same way. On the other hand, a composer like John Cage
preferred to "let the sounds speak for themselves" and went to a lot
of trouble to remove himself from the compositional process. Maybe
this is the sort of music you are thinking of -- but Cage only rarely
used a computer.
My computer generated composition "Millennium Fanfares," which is
almost completely predetermined by an algorithm, is, in my opinion,
extremely emotional. Not because the computer wanted it that way, but
because I kept "tuning" the algorithm until I got the sort of result
I was looking for. If I never got anything meaningful from it, I'd
have abandoned the project. If you're wondering whether anyone else
would find it meaningful, you can listen online and judge for
yourself: http://doktorgee.worldzonepro.com/GrauerMusic3.html
Victor Grauer
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
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