It has always been a dream of mankind that music would not only be produced by instruments played by musicians, but that machines would be able to create music on their own. As early as the 18th century, music boxes that could play well-known melodies were very popular, and composers in the rank of Mozart and Beethoven were not above composing pieces for so-called musical clocks. However, the theoretical foundations for a machine that could compose music as well as perform complex arithmetic tasks were laid in 1840 by Charles Babbage with his “Analytical Engine”. Based on this early vision of machine-based music creation, this part of the series “AI in the Music Industry” takes a closer look at music creation using computers since the 1980s.
AI in the Music Industry – Part 8: Machines Create Music
In August 1840, the mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage gave a series of lectures at the University of Turin on his recently developed calculating machine, which he called the “Analytical Engine” and which was capable not only of simple arithmetic operations but also of solving entire systems of equations. The young Italian mathematician and engineer Luigi Federico Menabrea, later Prime Minister of the United Italian Kingdom, was in the audience and wrote a summary of Charles Babbage’s lecture, which was published in French by the Bibliothèque Universelle de Genève in October 1842. This text was translated into English by Augusta Ada King-Noel, Countess of Lovelace, and published under the acronym A.A.L. in September 1843 in the journal “Scientific Memories”, edited by Richard Taylor in London.[1]
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of the famous Romantic poet Lord Byron and received a solid mathematical education from her tutors. At the age of 17, she met Charles Babbage and worked with him on the development of the Analytical Engine.[2] She was therefore very familiar with Babbage’s calculating machine and it is not surprising that she not only translated Menabrea’s text but also commented on it in detail. These “Notes by the Translator”,[3] which incidentally are three times as long as the translated source text, contain not only an explanation of the mathematical principles and the functioning of the “Analytical Engine”, but also fundamental considerations on the areas of application of the machine: “Supposing, for instance, that the fundamental relations of pitched sounds in the science of harmony and of musical composition were susceptible of such expression and adaptations, the engine might compose elaborate and scientific pieces of music of any degree of complexity or extent.”[4] That was a bold prediction, but in the end Lady Lovelace was right that machines could compose music on their own.
It took more than 140 years,[5] for Lady Lovelace’s vision to become reality. A writer’s block of the US composer David Cope stood at the begin of a revolution in music creation by machines. In 1985 he was commissioned by conductor Fred Cohen and the Cornell New Music Ensemble to write an opera about the Navajo people of Arizona and New Mexico. However, the successful composer and father of four was unable to fulfil the commission. As the deadline approached, he found it increasingly difficult to concentrate on composing. In an interview for Live INNOVATION.ORG[6] in 2018 Cope remembered, that colleagues at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) had jokingly advised him to use a computer to help him compose the opera in order to overcome the blockade. However, Cope took up the suggestion because since the early 1980s he had been pursuing the goal of having a computer program imitate the compositional style of great composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Chopin.[7] However, the results were not very convincing. So he fed his Apple 2E with his compositions to help him create the commissioned opera. He called the programme “Experiments in Music Intelligence”, EMI for short. EMI or Emmy,[8] as he later called his compositional tool, now made compositional suggestions that he could accept or reject. In any case, Emmy helped him to complete the opera, which was premiered on 30 November 1989 under the title “Cradle Falling” at the Camp Theatre of Richmond University.[9]
David Cope, however, did not let the audience know that a computer programme had helped him with the composition, and was delighted to read the reviews in the newspaper the next day. The music critic for the Richmond News Leader was touched by the music and praised: “‘Cradle Falling’ unquestionably is a modern masterpiece.”[10] This success spurred David Cope to continue and deepen his experiments in musical intelligence. He trained Emmy on compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang A. Mozart, Frederik Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Scott Joplin and other composers so that the algorithm could learn their particular style. The result was astonishing. When he once set Emmy the task of composing chorales in the style of Johann S. Bach, the programme spit out 5,000 works while he was making a sandwich in the kitchen.[11] He achieved similar success with piano sonatas in the style of Mozart or with mazurkas that sounded like Chopin.
In 1991 Cope summarised his approach and results in the book “Experiments in Musical Intelligence” and two years later he released the CD “Bach by Design: Computer Composed Music” (CRC2184) on Centaur Records, featuring works in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Béla Bartók, Frederik Chopin, Wolfgang A. Mozart, George Gershwin, Scott Joplin and Sergei Prokofiev, as well as works by the composer himself. As no musicians could be found to interpret the works, the computer had to take over this task as well. This was followed in 1997 by the CD ‘Classical Music Composed by Computer: Experiments in Musical Intelligence’ (CRC2329), on which compositions in the style of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Joplin, Rachmaninov, Mozart and Stravinsky were recorded by human performers, including his wife, the pianist Mary Jane Cope. This was followed in 1997 by ‘Virtual Mozart’ (CRC2452) with a symphony and a piano concerto in the style of Mozart on Centaur Records, and in 2003 by ‘Virtual Bach’ (CRC 2619) with a piano concerto, a cello suite and a Brandenburg concerto by Johann S. Bach.
In 2004, after 11,000 compositions in the style of deceased composers, David Cope decided to end his “Experiments in Music Intelligence” and open a new chapter in algorithm-based music. His new composition programme, called ‘Emily Howell’, was intended not only to imitate existing musical works, but also to create new, original works by processing feedback from listeners via an interface and composing with the help of a huge database, still from Emmy. Emily Howell’s first album, ‘From Darkness, Light’, was released by Centaur Records in 2009. (CRC3023). Although these works are no longer derived from existing compositions according to the top-down approach, but were generated by a learning algorithm, Cope does not go so far as to claim that Emily Howell is a composer, but merely a tool with which new types of compositions can be created, as he emphasised several times in the interview quoted above.[12] Nevertheless, Cope’s ‘Experiments in Music Intelligence’ are the first attempts at AI-generated music creation that produced original musical works.
Endnotes
[1] Wikisource, “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers” translated by Augusta Ada Lovelace. Article XXIX in Scientific Memoirs, selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, edited by Richard Taylor, Volume 3, London: Printed by Richard and John Taylor, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, pp 666-690.
[2] For the biography of Ada Lovelace, see Doris L. Moore, 1977, Ada Countess of Lovelace. Byron’s Legitimate Daughter. London: John Murray.
[3] Wikisource, “Notes by the Translator” to “Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage Esq. By L. F. Menabrea, of Turin, Officer of the Military Engineers” translated by Augusta Ada Lovelace, Article XXIX in Scientific Memoirs, selected from the Transactions of Foreign Academies of Science and Learned Societies, edited by Richard Taylor, Volume 3, London: Printed by Richard and John Taylor, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, pp 691-731.
[4] Ibid., p 694.
[5] In fact, the first piece of music composed by a computer was created in 1957, when Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson, both professors at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, programmed a large computer system, the Illinois Automatic Computer I (ILLIAC I), to independently produce a string quartet, the Illiac Suite. However, it is not yet possible to speak of artificial intelligence, because the computer was given all the instructions by the programmers and only carried out what it was told to do. See: Lejaren A. Hiller & Leonard M. Isaacson, 1959, Experimental Music: Composition with an Electronic Computer, 2nd edition, New York: McGraw-Hill, pp 5-7.
[6] Live Innovation.org, “David Cope: A Lifetime Contribution to Artificial Intelligence and Music”, November 19, 2018, accessed: 2024-02-07.
[7] In his book “Computers and Musical Style”, published in 1991, the composer cites a diary entry from 1981: “I envision a time in which new works will be convincingly composed in the styles of composers long dead. These will be commonplace and, while never as good as the originals, they will be exciting, entertaining, and interesting. Musicians and non-musicians alike will interact with programs that allow them to endlessly tinker with the styles of the composing programs”, p xiii.
[8] David Cope later used the abbreviation Emmy instead of EMI to avoid confusion with the British record company of the same name. See: David Cope & Douglas Hofstadter, 2001, Virtual Music. Computer Synthesis of Musical Style, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, p 33.
[9] The concert programme can be found in the repository of the University of Richmond: https://scholarship.richmond.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1924&context=all-music-programs, accessed: 2024-02-07.
[10] The concert review from 1 December 1989 in the Richmond New Leader can be read on the webpage of David Cope at the University of California, Santa Cruz: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty//cope/cradle.htm, accessed: 2024-02-07.
[11] The Guardian, “David Cope: ‘You pushed the button and out came hundreds and thousands of sonatas'”, July 11, 2010, accessed: 2024-02-07.
[12] Live Innovation.org, “David Cope: A Lifetime Contribution to Artificial Intelligence and Music”, November 19, 2018, accessed: 2024-02-07.
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