Hacker News Reader

Comment by enbrill | Hacker News Reader

Ever heard of Emily Howell? She's a bot.

She can write an infinite amount of new music all day for free. People can't tell the difference between her and human composers when put to a blind test.

Emily Howell fugue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLR-_c_uCwI David Cope Emmy Vivaldi (composed by Emily): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2kuY3BrmTfQ

View on HN

sorry, but: caveat city.

I studied with Dr. Cope here:

http://arts.ucsc.edu/programs/WACM

Emmy is not the same as Emily Howell; the Emmy Vivaldi was composed by a simpler program called EMI.

In either case, iirc, the music's composed by probabilistically combining key-signature-normalized snippets of existing compositions. EMI mostly just took the works of one composer and created a new work in that composer's style by Frankenstein-remixing snippets of the composer's actual works. Emily Howell, iirc, does the same, but uses multiple composers and/or original snippets by Dr. Cope.

btw: feed EMI Beethoven, and "she" produces Mozart. i.e., when probabilistically combining several key-signature-normalized Beethoven snippets, some of the results were identical to larger snippets of Mozart (who was, as you may have guessed, a big Beethoven fan).

also btw: Beethoven wrote algorithmic compositions for people to perform as a parlor game, with dice.

also also btw: my own drum-and-bass Ruby project from years ago will generate an infinite amount of new jungle riddims all day for free:

https://github.com/gilesbowkett/archaeopteryx

Damn, that is a little fancier than my DubStep.rb program: https://github.com/cortesoft/DubStep.rb

> btw: feed EMI Beethoven, and "she" produces Mozart. i.e., when probabilistically combining several key-signature-normalized Beethoven snippets, some of the results were identical to larger snippets of Mozart (who was, as you may have guessed, a big Beethoven fan).

I think you may mean the other way around; Mozart war 15 years older than Beethoven, and died before Beethoven's career took off.

ugh, how embarassing. you're right about the ages. I'd have to check my notes to be sure if I got the whole thing messed around, or just who was a fan of whom, but you're probably right about that part, too.

Feeding Bach into a Markov generator makes for pleasant tunes

Here's a blast from the pre Go-lang world

http://ipn.caerwyn.com/2007/04/lab-77-unexpected-markov.html

You'd be able to tell the difference between her and a human composer in a blind test when the "fugue" turns out to be a single melody wandering with no direction. I wonder who conducted these blind tests.

Presumably this music doesn't have a copyright as it's algorithmically generated and so has no human author? Similar to the case of a photograph taken by an animal (orangutan?) that made headlines a few months back.

That's like saying I can't copyright an image I made entirely within GIMP because it has no human artist. Cope's program may be more generative than a general-purpose graphics program, but the fact remains that Cope is still the creator.

>That's like saying I can't copyright an image I made entirely within GIMP because it has no human artist. //

Not if you created an algorithm that uses GIMP and runs independent of you. Copyright protects artistic works by natural persons.

Cope is the creator of the algorithm and has copyright protection of any artistic elements of that algorithm. Copyright does not protect technical effort no matter how skilled.

In the same way my camera's firmware writer, though skilled, has technical input in to all images created with that camera. But as they don't have artistic input in to any specific image they don't share the copyright - they may have made the image vastly superior with their technical ability (white-balance, focus, filters) but it was technical input and not "artistic".

Edit: a reference for the general principle under the USC, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Compendium_of_US_Copyrigh....

If a monkey steals your camera and takes a photo, who owns the copyright to that photo?

It would be more like if the orangutan took a photo and then a human edited it heavily to create the final work.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com