UCSC Review Winter 1995

Can Computers Compose?

David Cope never creates alone anymore. The internationally renowned composer and scholar says he prefers to work in partnership with EMI--a computer program he invented that has provoked both admiration and controversy for its ability to create music on its own.

Pronounced "emmy" and short for Experiments in Musical Intelligence, EMI can compose original music in the style of any composer. Cope says the program has two purposes. The first is as a composing partner: "Anytime I have a block I can get help from EMI, who can give me logical new ideas." Secondly, Cope uses EMI to understand and replicate the styles of other composers. Since 1987, the program has composed in the styles of Mozart, Bach, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Joplin--and Cope.

It took six years to create the complex six-step algorithm of EMI. It works like this: Cope carefully selects and inputs compatible works of music from a composer (pieces with similar tempos, ranges, and orchestration); EMI analyzes them, identifies signatures (characteristics unique to the composer), breaks the music into its components, and, ultimately, recombines the music into a new piece that preserves the composer's signatures.

Of the 100 or so people in the world creating music through computer algorithms, Cope is the only one with a program that works by analyzing and recombining previously composed music-- and it has provoked extreme reactions. He has been invited to perform and speak around the world; he released a CD of EMI's music in 1994 with Centaur Records and is working on another to be released within the next year; he has published one book on EMI with A-R Editions/Oxford University Press, and will release another this spring that includes a CD-ROM containing an offspring program of EMI named SARA (Simple Analytic Recombinance Algorithm).

But he has also received hate mail and angry write-ups by reviewers. At a conference in Germany in 1988, Cope recalls being confronted by an incensed musicologist who announced, in German, "Music is dead." And then, pointing a finger in Cope's face he exclaimed, "And you did it."

Cope says that EMI frequently provokes such intense reactions. At the root seems to be a fear that if EMI really can compose, then the power to create is not uniquely human.

"We're one small speck in the universe. Why do people think we have an exclusive claim on creativity?" Cope asks. "EMI creates in much the same way that composers before it have done. No one creates wildly new music each time they compose. How could we recognize their music if they were not repeating patterns they had used before. Composers are taking music they already know and recombining it--usually in marvelous new ways. That's exactly what EMI does."

--Barbara McKenna