What is a composer?

Interesting article about "computer composers"

from

Peter Todd's Publications on

Music composition/cognition

Cognitive Science Program Indiana University, Bloomington

Any comments are welcome

http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/pubs/viewfile.asp?fileToView=99evmus.pdf

A good composer is someone who has a fucked up life but a privileged mind like no other.

and really crappy finances...

That's included in the fucked up life. :whistling:

oh, sorry... did I mention? composers are obsessive-compulsive by nature?

which was why I insisted on the detailed list :whistling:

Didn't many composers during the 20th century often have a second job, so that they could manage financially?

Nonsense. :whistling:

oh, sorry... did I mention? composers are obsessive-compulsive by nature?

which was why I insisted on the detailed list ;)

*high five*

Didn't many composers during the 20th century often have a second job, so that they could manage financially?

Heathens!

Seriously though, I'd never even consider doing anything but music. Even if I had to drink water from a brooklet, hunt my own food and live in a small shack in the forest. (with a deranged, out-of-tune piano of course)

Hmm, actually, that does sound quite alluring...

I'm with you on that one.

Go Letty!

what you mean.. you guys don't ALL have jobs as Chippendales strippers to help offset the costs of being a composer?

hmm, and there I was, thinking "jee, I'm not 55, but I still look OK in a bathing suit...." oh, wait, that's not me!!!!!!!!!

im amused by your comments but was hoping of something more along the lines of what I origanlly posted.. wether a computer can be considered a composer.. i didn't specifically say that but thats what the article I found is all about!

A computer with exact human intelligence could be a good, perhaps incredible composer due to the fact that it could learn incredibly quickly. This is why all computer-composer projects should end so that I won't have any competition from machines in the future :D.

interesting answer, any thoughts on composers using the aid of a computer to help them write music? for example using the computer to harmonize a melody or come up with other ideas.. maybe a motive etc. that can be incorporated into a full musical picture by the human who is in some control. ( I personally believe it to be sort of taking the easy route if you allow the computer to help you with all the basics.. because I think that atleast for me.. being a composer is all about having an individual kind of sound, the computer may rather facilitate a more structured sound but that sound may result in the cost of originality. but thats just me.. Although I'm sure some fascinating results may be obtained through the use of a computer/ mathematical algorithms

Art is Expression. Computers have no expression, therefore, no art. They can write music, but they cannot compose it.

I intend to make use of computers in my composition when I become more adept at programming/mathematics, until then I'm doing it manually :w00t:

Computers will very soon possess the capacity to produce music just as well, if not more interestingly than we do as living breathing people. This is something of an inevitability and I'm not entirely sure why anyone would bother denying it; especially since it's a problem that our generation of composers will have to most likely deal with - maybe even compete with.

Art is Expression. Computers have no expression, therefore, no art. They can write music, but they cannot compose it.

Arguments like this one are fairly useless in this particular case (no offence, please) because they deal with technicalities of the actual words themselves. Not even starting with the fact that you've given a concept such as art an arbitrary definition to prove your point, the argument just leads down a winding and essentially fruitless path of thought. For example, who's to say computers have no expression? What is expression? etc etc. As I said, fruitless because the discussion would end up going on and on without reaching any conclusion - that's the basis of philosophy; it's an unanswerable set of questions that help us draw our own conclusions and understandings of the world.

Saying that computers can't compose music, only write it, means next to nothing since the two terms can be used interchangeably here. Suggesting that expression is necessary for "composition" would mean that no human is therefore capable of merely "writing" music, since expression is arguably an inescapable part of who and how we are. You see how the sense begins to falter here.

Even nowadays, there are synth modules (such as the absolutely amazing KARMA one in the Oasys keyboard synth) which can "improvise" music all on their own; for multiple instruments simultaneously without being based on pre-conceived patterns of chord progression or rhythm. As a result, we composers must begin to ask ourselves how it will affect the future of our art. Ultimately, once people start regularly using computers to help them harmonize or create melodies, the art of composing will become less of a unique craft and more of a skill like riding a bike. In the end, human input may become more of a burden than an asset to the process.

Those are the thoughts we should be having here, people. Denying the progress of technological evolution within our society isn't going to help anyone - we should be thinking of how we'll be working with or around the facts in the future. Pretending it's not going to happen is about as intelligent as holding a candle in the night time and being confident that you'll always be the prime light source because the sun will never rise.

Computers cannot be composers. They are programmed by humans, therefore if you allow your computer to compose for you, it is not your composition... it's the programmer's composition.

Computers cannot be composers. They are programmed by humans, therefore if you allow your computer to compose for you, it is not your composition... it's the programmer's composition.

And I suppose by the same token photographers cannot be artists, right? Cameras are also programmed by humans, so therefore if you allow it to take the picture for you instead of drawing it yourself, it's not your picture, right? It's Nikon's.

*sigh*

It's all down to the definition.

I have programmed several stuff to give me results and series to base my composititions. I'm sure I could give enough "guidlines" to a C# program to get it to compose something.

But it would be... simmilar all the time...

Other than that unless we can decipher what is that drives as to compose, instead of make a phonecall, we will be fine... If computers decide to shut MSN and write a solo piano piece instead, then we're in trouble.

Programs are already capable of producing very fine music pieces, perfect by the rules, but for some reason we don't want to call it composition. Becasue we know that we are capable of more, even though we don't actually practice it.

Go figure...

I feel it necessary to interject here before people who may not know better take the particularly dangerous assumption that Nikolas has made and consider it perfectly true.

I'm speaking about the assumption that all computer-generated music will sound "similar". The fact is that the software and capabilities exist today even (let's not even imagine the future for now) to create music that goes beyond any set of standard "rules" or classical guidelines in order to produce music that's just as, if not more, organic and transient than comparable human-generated equivalents.

To slightly edit Nik's concluding statement;

Programs are already capable of producing very fine music pieces, but we don't want to call it composition because we wish they couldn't - since it may threaten our work.

Whoops! Don't want to be considered true! :w00t:

Just an idea:

The idea of composition, for me, progresses more than just the rules and techniques. It goes on the reasons, why you compose. And unless the computer opens up and goes "Hey! Let's write something", it's not 100% composition.

And after the romantic view came through here is the real life one:

I can get some programs (can't remember names though), where you enter some variations and you get a finished mp3. Perfect! in minutes. And you know what? It's a library kind of thing that simply works! It does! I swear it does! I heard it!

Technically, computers can do it. I can do it better for now, becasue I can also drink a beer and provide better feedback to the devs, ro something. But it's still a "threat"

We don't want to think it this way, but mainly I have faith in me, AND MARIUS to not think it this way! PERIOD! ;)

I intend to make use of computers in my composition when I become more adept at programming/mathematics, until then I'm doing it manually :w00t:

We must just love disagreeing with each other or something. ;)

I'm just trying to be the voice of realistic pragmatism here. As much as the romantic notion of what a composer is serves as wonderful food for thought and makes for some healthy philosophical debating, the cold hard facts of the matter are that if a company will, in the future, be able to simply have a piece of software than can create a piece of music to perfectly suit their needs in a fraction of the time it would take a "real" composer to do it...then we're scraggy-out-of-luck, if you'll pardon the language.

We must just love disagreeing with each other or something. :w00t:

Perhaps.