discovering the essentials of music composition

books:

	• Experiments in Musical Intelligence (Computer Music and Digital Audio Series) David Cope A-R Editions, 1996 - 263 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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discovering the essentials of music composition

Experiments in Musical Intelligence (1996) is actually a sequel to Cope's Computers and Musical Style, published in 1991. Both books together are, in the first place, a research report on and introduction to EMI and SARA, computer programs developed in LISP by David Cope for music composition. Whereas the 1991 publication concentrated on general aspects, such as the history of automated music, an introduction to LISP and general concepts for composition programs, the Experiments in Musical Intelligence elaborates more on the details of the algorithms used in EMI and SARA themselves. The most important contribution of Cope is EMI itself. After reading both Experiments in Musical Intelligence and the 1991 publication, one must conclude that Cope did a tremendous effort in the design and implementation of a complete set of tools for algorithmic composition. Whereas other tools for algorithmic composition, like Common Music, MAX or Symbolic Composer, are merely a set of tools, David Cope's EMI is a philosophy and a set of tools in one. Cope's philosophy is based on the Würfelspiel idea that composing music is mainly a matter of recombining musical phrases. EMI analyses existing scores and recombines the found elements into new compositions in accordance with the found style. The analysis has two main parts: (1) the analysis of musical phrases according to a Schenker-based hierarchy, and (2) a pattern-matching based analysis of so-called "signatures" (i.e. recurrent musical phrases, which seem to identify a composer's style). If a corpus of existing music is thus analysed, EMI provides a recombinatory algorithm, based on linguistic techniques (Augmented Transition Networks), recombining the analysed elements into a new composition. EMI, in short, is a style analysis and composition generation tool. In contrast with other algorithmic composition tools, Cope's EMI is data- or corpus-based instead of rule-based, which makes it a unique and promising tool for algorithmic composition, but also for the musicological analysis of musical styles. EMI seems to be a very powerful set of analysis tools for western-european classical music in any case, and maybe for other musical cultures as well. Cope has done an enormous effort to deal with all kinds of major and minor problems, like segmenting music into phrases, analysing tonal functions, analysing rhythm and meter correlations with tonal functions, and other problems one encounters when analysing a musical style. EMI is a repertoire of solutions to formal-analytical problems in the field of style analysis, and in this respect EMI is a major second step after Hiller and Isaacson's Experimental Music from 1959. The main `discovery' of Cope is the concept of the `signature': every corpus of works not only has general stylistic characteristics, but also some phrases that are used over and over again almost literally. Cope discovered that the recognizability of a style is significantly enhanced when these `signatures' are used in their literal form now and then within a work. Although Cope did not prove his signature theory within scientific boundaries, he is at least providing musicology with a provable theory. When listening to the classical examples of EMI (Mozart sonatas, Beethoven sonata, Bach inventions, Rachmaninoff Suites), I could not suppress the idea that there was something missing. First I thought this was due to a cognition problem: the mere knowledge of the fact that Beethoven never composed this EMI-sonata already brings in a fundamental distrust towards the originality of the work. But even when one drops this historical consciousness, the sonatas and other EMI-imitations, although stylistically correct, lack a certain degree of originality. At first sight this seems to be due to the recombination idea: recombining existing elements does not particularly stimulate originality or surprises. But I think EMI can be enhanced very easily in such a way, that surprises are not excluded. The main point is that Cope restricts himself to the analysis of a stylistic coherent corpus (e.g. all Beethoven sonatas). It can easily be foreseen that this will always bring music with quite a predictable character, because they all stem from the same source. In reality, however, a composer never bases himself on his own music only, but mostly has a corpus of other works, other styles and musical elements that surpass the notion of a style and have a more general, cross-cultural basis, like melodic shapes, rhythmic patterns and retoric forms. The combination of corpus-based elements and context-based elements would enable a definition of the concept of `surprise' or `something-completely-different' as a stylistic element. If Cope would allow EMI to have not only a set of corpus-based elements, but also a set of generally applicable `super-style' musical notions, I'm sure EMI will be able to surprise the listener with a really `new' Beethoven sonata. It is important to stress that EMI is not only about new Beethoven sonatas. As a composition tool, EMI presupposes a style-conscious way of composition and a recombinant approach to musical form. In this respect EMI is more than a `composition' generator; it has the potential to be a style generator. Although David Cope uses EMI to develop his own style, as he states in the conclusions of Experiments in Musical Intelligence, and is intrigued by the idea to prolong a style after the composer's death, I think the real futuristic potential and importance of EMI lies in the fact that it enables one to create style itself, to build an oeuvre of styles instead of compositions. As a book, Experiments in Musical Intelligence is not only a research report, but foremost a learning book for algorithmic composition techniques. The book contains introductions to pattern matching, programming in Object Oriented LISP (CLOS) and Augmented Transition Networks. Cope explains his algorithms clearly with many music examples which are very illustrative. Together with the complete code for EMI's subset SARA on the CD-ROM, Experiments in Musical Intelligence is a must for the education on algorithmic composition on graduate level. Regrettably the CD-ROM can only be run on a Apple Macintosh computer, disabling PC users unnecessarily, whereas most part of the CD is text, MIDI and sound which can be displayed and played on PCs as well as Macintoshes. It is also hoped that the more sophisticated algorithms of EMI, which are not part of SARA, will be available for research and compositional experiments in a next release.

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Fine overview of Cope's significant work

David Cope's signifcant theories of musical creativity as recombination are advocated articulately and aptly demonstrated through his ground-breaking EMI software program. Descriptions of the process give an insight into the working process of this system which allows for thinking about the elements of music in different ways.

This book provides an excellent overview of what Cope has done as well as presents a scaled-down version of EMI, SARA, which allows any user to gain a feeling for the workings of the software.

This is significant research, and this is a book worth having for anybody interested in algorithmic composition as well as those who are interested in theories of musical creativity.

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