Computer Generated Music Composition

With today's virtual instruments, audio editing programs...there's no limit...

But what's about Composing music, how to create new song/melody/theme...? Composing music with computers is almost norm? Pro Et Contra?

Maybe for some people, but I still always sit my but down on a piano and work that way.

*whistles* http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/robot-composer-5175.html

/me now wanders off due to the robinjessomness of his post...

*whistles*http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/robot-composer-5175.html

/me now wanders off due to the robinjessomness of his post...

Tee hee :thumbsup: I'd also have mentioned this thread: http://www.youngcomposers.com/forum/anything-wrong-composing-computer-13408.html

Meanwhile - regarding the original post:

With today's virtual instruments, audio editing programs...there's no limit...

But what's about Composing music, how to create new song/melody/theme...? Composing music with computers is almost norm? Pro Et Contra?

:huh:

I don't quite get what you're aiming at...

Using computers for notation? For rendering audio/samples/sequencing? What do you mean 'composing music with computers'?

PEC, even though I expect you'll never return, I ask you to explain, please!!

Computer generated music means to me music written by computer, not by composer using computer. Serial music seems to be the easiest for computers to compose. Which leads me to another question: Is the serial composer useless? ;)

A Palestrina-style motet would be just as "ideomatic" for a computer.

But the thing most people ignore is that even if notes in a piece are calculated, a composer still needs to define the type and parameters of this calculation, which can be very essential musical decisions. Pretty much every serial piece has other basic structural ideas, on which the "calculations" are based. There simply doesn't exist any piece where the composer didn't have to consciously make any decisions, so even if you have a computer "write your music", you have to program the computer with specific musical aims in mind, and depending on what these musical aims are, the resulting piece will sound totally different. A computer never dictates anything. It is the composer who dictates what the computer should do.

While most of what I write is done without any "help" from the computer (besides maybe notation), I find that using the computer as a composing tool (and not just for notation and sound) can be a very fruitful experience, as the computer is often much more bold and direct than we humans dare to be, and may create more radical and unique results than we might come up with by our own. Whether we just accept these results as they are, or whether we only use them as an inspiration is another question.

But I always like it when to a piece I'm writing something enters that isn't just "entirely my own", but foreign even to me. This forces me to deal and converse with an "unknown object", so my piece is personal, yet still opens up windows in a musical world which is new to me and which challenges me to explore it. And for me, composing always has to do not just with writing down what's inside me, but with exploration of sounds and structures. (Not in a radical way, mind you, like "I want to do something nobody has ever done before", but rather personally, like "I want to musically experience something I didn't experience like that before".)

And there have definitely been pieces "composed" by a computer, which have given me unique musical experiences I will never forget. Clarence Barlow's "

I've been studying how Expert Systems mimic pro composers. I'd really like to see some music composition software which isn't only music sequencing software or music notation/graphing software.

I'd specifically like to see a program that will take a melody I input, perhaps only scanned in, that the computer then runs through all of the traditional music composition transformational devices without making me write them all out and test them on my instrument before I input them into the so called music composition software.

If and when it can instantly create, inversions, retrogrades, retrograde-inversions, permutations, augmentations, diminutions, diatonic transpositions, putting the original melodic series together with the rhythmic retrograde, or putting the melodic series' retrograde inversion with the original melodic rhythm or taking the melodic series from one tune and combining it with the melodic rhythm from another tune, automatically make a diatonic melody pentatonic or automatically change the mode, then and ONLY then will there be any real music composition software in the universe.

Most of the experiments using algorithms or fractals to compose music continue to be complete failures. Most music isn't that fractal and algorithms ALWAYS insert stuff that human ears reject as being unmusical.

I'd specifically like to see a program that will take a melody I input, perhaps only scanned in, that the computer then runs through all of the traditional music composition transformational devices without making me write them all out and test them on my instrument before I input them into the so called music composition software.

If and when it can instantly create, inversions, retrogrades, retrograde-inversions, permutations, augmentations, diminutions, diatonic transpositions, putting the original melodic series together with the rhythmic retrograde, or putting the melodic series' retrograde inversion with the original melodic rhythm or taking the melodic series from one tune and combining it with the melodic rhythm from another tune, automatically make a diatonic melody pentatonic or automatically change the mode...

Why? :huh:

...then and ONLY then will there be any real music composition software in the universe.

I think it would be fake music composition....

I'm pretty sure there are programs out there that can do the things you listed. If not, it wouldn't be terribly hard to program. And I suppose stuff like Common Lisp Music (usually used for algorithmic composition) could also used for the things you described.

In any case it's a wrong assumption to think there's only sequencing and notation software. This definitely leaves out all the actual sound synthesis software (Max/MSP, Csound, SuperCollider, etc.) and things like Common Lisp Music and other tools designed for algorithmic composition.

And I wouldn't be so quick with saying "ALWAYS". I've heard plenty of algorithmic computer music which I didn't find unmusical at all. And believe it or not, I have human ears.

as more and more composers use computing software for notation/composing, the methodology/thought process of a composer becomes less transparent or maybe even lost...

as computing software improves, our composition pallet is also widened.

perhaps what may scare some of us the most is the fact that technology may be so good that it takes away the skill set, and allows what would have been mediocre composers to create above average works.