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Musikalisches Domino-spiel
Inspired by David Cope's research (Computer and Musical Style [1991] and Experiments in Musical Intelligence [1996]), I decided to explore the educational potential of some of his main ideas. Music can be an important tool for teaching abstract principles, mathematics, algorithms, etc. Also, at the same time any music and musical system raises many issues about the music itself, as a structure, and as a system. This page is based on a very similar page that I created in 1997 to implement an easy interactive way to compose versions of Mozart's 'Musikalisches Wrfelspiel'. This page is currently being used by mathematics teachers all over the world as a playful example of probability. In this document, I can only very briefly touch on the surface of some of the ideas that David Cope sets out in his books. Nevertheless, I believe that the simple example I have created makes these ideas much more accessible than Cope has made them, even with the help of the software that is distributed on CD-rom with Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
(Cope 1996:1) This assumption, together with Cope's outspoken preference for a certain few classical composers, explains a great deal of his work. It has shaped the whole design of his composition software and it has determined the compositions that he has created with it.
Style
Cope's main research interest in automatic composition, has to do with the formalization of style. His software tries to recreate music in a way that the style survives the re-composition process. Cope maintains a fairly strict concept of style; a 'baroque' style has too wide a meaning for him, he sees stylistic consistency only within certain groups of compositions of a certain composer. For this purpose, Cope has developed the following general algorithm to process example composition, and create new compositions by recombining elements from the examples:
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Musikalisches Domino-spiel
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Analysis
EMI's analysis component tries to apply a functional analysis to the harmonic progression of the given music. This functional analysis is called the SPEAC system. (Statement, Preparation, Extension, Antecedent, Consequent). The reason behind this functional analysis, is to be able to recombine music in ways that the recombined harmony follows the same logical rules as the original harmonic progression.
Pattern matching
Cope has found out, through experiments with music-students, that an important part of a composers style, is communicated through what he calls 'signatures': certain melodic and/or rhythmic patterns that are found in several of the composer's pieces. EMI tries to maintain those signatures by first detecting them through pattern matching. (searching for occurrences of similar patterns that are found in different pieces.) Then, those signatures which are detected are protected from recomposition and thus remain intact.
Deconstruction
The music is then cut up in little pieces (usually measures), and stored in a database to be retrieved on harmonic function. (lexicons)
Reconstruction
Then, a new composition is created by following the rules of a simple ATN (augmented transition network, see below), that define possible transitions over harmonic functions. Two further constraints apply here: (1) voice-leading rules, melodies have certain preferences for what pitches they may be followed up with; and (2) cadences have a backward-working constraint on the normally forward looking ATN; they require
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to be preceded by a correct harmonic introduction, while their position in the resulting composition is fixed.
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Musikalisches Domino-spiel
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Just as the Musikalisches Wrfelspiel is being used to teach the mathematics of probability, this page could be used to explain transition network and musical phrase structure. This is quite an easy level of understanding, for which there is no actual musical understanding required. On a higher level, for musicstudents, the page can be a helpful tool for exploring the SPEAC system and to explore the rules for voiceleading, as explained above.
Creativity
The EMI-system, impressive as it is, does not even begin to explore some of the most interesting possibilities offered by the underlying theory. This is not meant to be critical of David Cope, whose great achievements in the artificial intelligence of music and automatic composition were only possible through his dedication to the very clear goal of reproducing style in automatic compositions. These interesting possibilities are to be found in the new creative paradigms that can benefit from the system, by using the system, or the theory behind the system, in ways that it was not intended to be used. Some creative fields that can benefit from the EMI-system, its theory and its algorithms, are: (1) real-time generation, (2) fully automatic generation, and (3) collaborative generation.
Real-time generation
The system could probably easily be adapted to support real-time on stage composition. The workings of analysis and composition of EMI, as developed to imitate styles of classical composition, seems very suitable to imitate the style of jazz soloists. The combination of ATN for structuring and positioning of general (melodic) material, with the maintenance of well-positioned protected signatures, is very similar to exactly the way jazz-improvisation is generally taught to aspiring soloists.
Collaborative generation
Another way to eliminate the contingencies and limitations of the individual, and to explore the beauty of the multitude, mankind as a whole, the interconnected subject, is to create methods of collaborative creativity. With a system that can reduce the decision making process to choices of elements in databases, it is feasible to come to interesting results with very simple means.
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Musikalisches Domino-spiel
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understanding itself. Cope's idea that 'The genius of great composers, I believe, lies not in inventing previously unimagined music but in their ability to effectively reorder and refine what already exists', may be the main problem here. It seems obvious that, even though at the surface the resulting music might be explained to be just recombinations of existing material, what these composers were doing, was quite something different to what this software is doing. These composers had a story to tell, they had musical ideas which stretched beyond the idea of 'lets put this bar after that one'.
Practical issues
Although, aesthetically speaking, I see little future for the form of automatic composition that Cope promotes, there clearly must be a future for his (and similar) software systems that aid composers, and particularly arrangers. Although nobody is waiting for the explosion of masses of new empty music (similar to modern pop music) that can now be created with a 3 button interface, there is certainly a market for affordable original arrangements for community big-bands, brass-bands, all over the world. The writing of such arrangements is not very demanding on the creative side, and much of the manual labour involved should be automated up to a point where each band can create their own arrangements. This would make the meetings of such bands much more interesting, and it would allow for more arrangements to be automatically tailored to the members of the band.
References
Back to the 'Compose' page David Cope Compose your own Musikalisches Wrfelspiel Zsofi Ruttkay's page on the educational aspect of Mozart's Musikalisches Wrfelspiel Cope, David (1991), Computers and Musical Style, Madison, Wisconsin; A-R Editions Cope, David (1996), Experiments in Musical Intelligence, Madison, Wisconsin; A-R Editions Bernstein, L (1973), The Unanswered Question, Harvard Univ. Press
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