Quote:
Originally Posted by luderart
That I could identify with near-100 percent confidence (see post No. 12) (and I assure you I inserted the 'nearly' only as insurance for some self-esteem in case there was 1 chance in a million I was wrong) that No. 2 was by Bach is I think proof enough that the computer, having no life and no true mind, indeed composes "music which has no soul", no real substance. I think the ones who were deceived, were deceived by its forgery of Bach's style, and as they made their decision they thought in terms of whether the piece was in Bach's style or in that of another composer's. What they ought to have done instead was to consider whether it was composed by a human or not, whether it had logical continuity, coherence, unity and progression. Had they done so, they would have seen that No. 1 was going nowhere and therefore clearly had no human behind its origin, for a human has a past and a present and a future and develops in time remembering his past and creating his future, whether in life or in artistic creations – something the computer doesn't. The computer also doesn't have the ability to select the appropriate parts and to fit these parts together in the most mentally meaningful way possible. Above all the computer's "creation" has no overall meaning, and music is above all meaningful.
In human composers the unconscious sees to it that links are created between ideas in consciousness, and that those ideas do not simply share a similarity in style but also an evolution or derivation from the same source or germinal idea or purpose. Can the computer create music praising God, for example? Of course not!
Luder
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I was hoping we could get a good debate going on this.
The fact that you guessed with 100 percent certainty is, I think, more a statement about how advanced you are in your musicianship than anything else. The point I think I'm trying to make I think is that they're so similar in how they sound that if either were sung by a good choir(or played by a good quartet/pianist/whatever) I could still be moved by the music. If I am
moved by a piece written by a machine, does the music have soul?
Granted, I have a hard time imagining myself being moved by either of those two pieces when they're rendered in midi. To my ears, this little snippets are the most vanilla of all music(Although a good choral sung by a good choir is pretty bitchin'!!!). This might be due to the fact that I'm in a university and have some kind of bias against stuff that reminds me of counterpoint exercises -shudder-. However, I do understand that you can get a lot out of something that(to me) is simply boring.
I think soul can be more something that the listener draws from the music. Just as a conductor works with a chorus to get them to make the music the most sheen image it can possibly be, a listener works with a piece as they hear it. If a listener hears that a piece has sloppy direction(Like example number one), they are unlikely to think that the piece was written by a machine in a soviet bunker. They are likely to think that either the composer is a student and still working through the kinks of his/her style or that the directionless aspect is part of the composer's style. And on that note, why couldn't it be? Debussy for instance, can be said to have a very free and in some instances directionless style.
I'll cut myself off here.