“Isn’t it the struggle that makes it fun?”

Nonsense, Does better video editing software make video montage less fun? Is Photoshop spoiling graphics editing since it was so much fun in MS Paint? Tools are there to make things, having the tools is never a guarantee that you can actually create the thing the tool is for.

I think taking music creation to the people is a good thing because rather than being passive CD buyers or MP3 pirates people get involved and entertain themselves making music. It doesn’t have to be hard to be fun be it that easy gained results will never provide a high level of personal satisfaction.

Then you sing, choose parameters and a style, burn CD and become rich….hahaha

Sometime in the future (although not in our lifetimes) there will be software capable of composing tonal music at the same level as humans, or better. This would not make music less human, per se, because human involvement would still be needed to create algorithms, which is basically what composition is anyway.

Pretty automated musical tools but the difference is that your decisions and feedback shape the overall outcome and some musical ability is needed to make something pleasing. It does arguable “dumb down” the theory side of music though..

The reason people write songs with instruments is that nothing beats the immediacy of being able to try a handful of chord combinations in quick succession to find underlying magic that makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. There’s an incredibly fluid interplay between melody and harmony that occurs in real time, and which develops with experience. You can’t access any of that by croaking monotonically into a microphone like a dying goat.

The trouble with predictive music software is that it always looks backwards, incorporating progressions that have worked in previous hits, along with styles which were popular in the past. There’s nothing new, unless you accidentally set the sliders to channel both George Gershwin and Frank Zappa in the same horrific tune.

The example above is anything but musical “intelligence.” It actually sounds like bad beginning theory exercises — though that’s also kind of interesting. It sounds like, aside from lacking a sample set large enough (which maybe also could be said of many beginning music students), the harmonic model is overly vertical. Just having proper voice leading doesn’t necessarily make harmonies coherent against a forward moving melody.

I also find it amusing that we got a spam trackback from a deaf spamblog.

;)

@Everyone: The sample set of 300 pieces is probably too small and/or they haven’t refined the model well enough to infer harmonic characteristics. The closest example to this that I can find at the moment is David Cope’s work with Experiments in Musical Intelligence where he had EMI create songs in the style of certain composers based on analyses of their body of work ( http://arts.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm <- mp3s). I consider this a lot more aesthetically successful.