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<TITLE>Re: [Smt-talk] Aesthetics of Computer-Generated Music</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Lucida Grande"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>Nicolas et al: Here is an early American example: <a href="http://www.kurzweiltech.com/raybio.html">http://www.kurzweiltech.com/raybio.html</a><BR>
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See it, unfortunately or fortunately depending on your point of view with the music mostly cut off, <BR>
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<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4Neivqp2K4</a><BR>
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You gotta love the former Miss America -- <BR>
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Dave Headlam<BR>
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On 4/8/11 3:02 PM, "Nicolas Meeùs" <<a href="nicolas.meeus@paris-sorbonne.fr">nicolas.meeus@paris-sorbonne.fr</a>> wrote:<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><BLOCKQUOTE><FONT FACE="Lucida Grande"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'> It seems to me that the case of computer-generated music is much akin to that of fakes in art. This is all the more interesting that, according to Nelson Goodman, fakes cannot exist in an allographic art such as music. What would be faked, in the case of computer-generated music, is its intentionality. The extent to which such music could produce an aesthetic effect strongly depends on the intentionality of the listener. For this reason, I doubt that an experimental study would produce any interesting result: the listener's answers would not depend on the music itself, rather (a) of their awareness of it being computer-generated; (b) of their opinion about this. I would think, therefore, that the question must be approached from a semiotic and/or philosophical point of view, not from a merely empirical/experimental one.<BR>
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Consider these cases:<BR>
– At a not too recent conference in the Sorbonne, one of the papers was read by a guy who had written a piece of software generating what he thought was (good) tonal music. He explained that he had come to love this music so much that he couldn't hear any other any more. The examples he made us listen to where awful – or so thought several of us. Obviously, neither this guy nor any of us judged the music on its inherent aesthetic value: we were guided by our personal convictions.<BR>
– Suppose that a real piece of music, written by a real composer, is presented as computer-generated. Many a listener might dislike it merely on the basis that it is (erroneously) thought to be a fake.<BR>
– Inversely, suppose that a computer-generated work is made to pass for the work of an interesting forgotten composer: many critics will praise it and praise the rediscovery of an unjustly neglected master.<BR>
– Etc.<BR>
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I do believe that common-practice tonality can be modelized with much more satisfying (and more precise results than what Marcel de Velde believes. Examples do exist (e.g. Mario Baroni, Rossana Dalmonte and Carlo Jacoboni's Legrense software described in their <I>Regole della musica</I>, successfully modelizing arie by Legrense). <BR>
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I don't think that intonation has any important share in this matter. After all, there exist recordings of, say, <I>The Art of Fugue</I>, on early synthetizers (Moog) which played in ET: I did not feel that the music suffered so much. The problem remains that just intonation isn't really usable in tonal music because the directionality of tonal harmony produces an unavoidable shift in pitch in just intonation. I suppose that one might construct a harmonic functionality that would balance the shifts in pitch, and that just intonation in that case might produce some sort of consonant effect that might seem of aesthetic value; but that would not be tonal music.<BR>
Marcel, your experiment in just intonation seems to me to sound much more like "modal" polyphony of the 16th century than like tonal music, precisely because your algorithm probably makes no provision for a tonal directionality of the harmony – and because limiting the range to the 5-limit-harmonic did not confront you to the problem of having to prepare and resolve 7ths, which one of the main causes of tonal directionality.<BR>
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Yours,<BR>
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Nicolas Meeùs<BR>
Université Paris-Sorbonne<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><SPAN STYLE='font-size:11pt'>-- <BR>
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Dave Headlam<BR>
Professor of Music Theory<BR>
Joint Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering<BR>
Eastman School of Music / The College<BR>
The University of Rochester <BR>
26 Gibbs St.<BR>
Rochester, NY 14604<BR>
<a href="dheadlam@esm.rochester.edu">dheadlam@esm.rochester.edu</a><BR>
<a href="http://theory.esm.rochester.edu/dave_headlam">http://theory.esm.rochester.edu/dave_headlam</a><BR>
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