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Apr. 11th, 2006 10:02 amFrom metafilter.com:
Douglas Hofstadter says, "What troubles me is the notion that things that touch me at my deepest core -- pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages -- might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul.". That was prompted by his reception to the output of David Cope's project Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
What leaps out at me is Hofstadter's description of how EMI works:
"EMI's central modus operandi, given a set of input pieces, is:
(1) chop up; (2) reassemble."
The obvious question is: if the parts that are chopped up and the rules for reassembling them are unique to a composer, why is it upsetting or surprising that they can be generated? What this doesn't imply is that _new_ composers and new parts and new rules can be generated by this program, so Hofstadter's feeling that we're really just dumb machine is less supportable.
Douglas Hofstadter says, "What troubles me is the notion that things that touch me at my deepest core -- pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages -- might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul.". That was prompted by his reception to the output of David Cope's project Experiments in Musical Intelligence.
What leaps out at me is Hofstadter's description of how EMI works:
"EMI's central modus operandi, given a set of input pieces, is:
(1) chop up; (2) reassemble."
The obvious question is: if the parts that are chopped up and the rules for reassembling them are unique to a composer, why is it upsetting or surprising that they can be generated? What this doesn't imply is that _new_ composers and new parts and new rules can be generated by this program, so Hofstadter's feeling that we're really just dumb machine is less supportable.
