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September 23, 2003

'who needs musicians when computers can think like bees?' @03:34 PM

so asks a Discover Magazine article by the usual suspect, mr. Stephen Johnson. the article lives here. as johnson notes, making computers autonomously compose music has always been a big thing in computer music. a quick check at the 2003 international computer music conference's papers and demos yields a hefty number of these keywords: detection, pattern extraction, algorithmic approaches to composing, etc. etc. the real big thing now is computer improvisation. the guy from the article, Tim Blackwell (sound clips on this page) is having bots improvise with other bots. others, including my thesis advisor at brown (_Todd Winkler). this is a hard problem, and has been researched heavily. I think that Blackwell's got the right idea here, though. Music and sound creation via a whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts system is natural I think. music is so essentially modular to begin with. this is an area where I'm going. the key, and something I think blackwell is ignoring, is adequately placing the composer in this emergent space. they need to be something more than someone who initializes variables.

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