At soundlounge, our job is to seek out the most talented musical minds for any given commercial brief. Our music supervision team can attest to the abundance of talented new composers eager to write original scores for TV ads and films. But what if we were able to tap into the minds of past geniuses like Bach or Beethoven? What if original music could be composed from beyond the grave? It might sound ridiculously farfetched, but through the power of computer processing, one clever composer has found a way to ‘reanimate’ the dead masters…
The folks over at Radiolab spoke with David Cope about his controversial dead-composer-resurrecting software EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence). His program can analyze sheet music and spit out an entirely new piece, based on the compositional style of the original music. Cope has tried it out with just about every famous composer, from Mozart to Scott Joplin, and the results have been eerily on-the-nose. When performed by human players, these pieces often turn out to be beautiful and moving.
Have a listen to the Radiolab conversation:
Cope admits that he gets criticized more often than praised. He has been in shouting matches and has even been physically attacked by people who feel threatened by his experiments. Cope explains:
“If you’ve spent a good portion of your life being in love with these dead composers…and along comes some twerp who claims to have this little piece of software…that can move you in the same way, suddenly you’re saying to yourself, ‘Well what’s happened here? Certainly my relation to the original pieces of music has cheapened in some way. Is Chopin really just nothing more than a bunch of clichés strung together?’”
It’s an unsettling thought for most music lovers. If we’re moved by a piece of music, we like to think it’s because the composer felt that same emotion, and was brilliant enough to put the emotion into musical notes. We’d feel like fools if we got emotional over a string of random notes.
But Cope’s invention upends the idea that the composer is the only emotional genius. In a way, it gives the performers and listeners more credit. As performers, we can take computer-generated sequences of notes and convey a meaningful story with them. As listeners, we hear these performances and create our own meaning. The emotions we feel are entirely from within, from our own musical background, from our own life experiences.
What are your thoughts? Does Cope’s software cheapen the work of the great composers, or does it honor them? Would you pay to see the premiere of a ‘new’ piece by Beethoven? Would you be offended if it showed up in the next car commercial?
You can listen to the entire Radiolab episode here. You can hear Cope’s EMI pieces here.
Charlie McCarron, Sound Consultant
soundlounge
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