Are composers necessary?

[Richard Ranft]

An interesting article and video published yesterday on the BBC's website, "Music evolution: Is this the end of the composer?", describes another attempt to create music by machine, starting with random computer noises, then subjecting them to 'Darwinian' forces: www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-18449939

The article implies that machines are the driving force behind this creativity. The stages in the experiment brilliantly illustrate the similar kind of development of complexity that happens over generations of organisms facing natural selection in nature, but, depending on your taste, may be uninspiring musically.

The day may arrive when computers can paint works of art, pass a Turing test of demonstrating human-like intelligence, or compose listenable tunes. But in this project, a group of humans are the key agents that act as natural selection on what the computer programme churns out, making it very different from creativity driven by computer (which of course originates from a human programmer anyway). "Evolution of music by public choice", the title of the original research paper, www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/06/12/1203182109 is a better description.

[Richard Ranft]

there's now a BBC Radio 4 programme, Darwin's Tunes, on the same subject:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01ljk56/Darwins_Tunes/

Is our taste in music, and how it's changed over the centuries, governed by creative genius or simply by survival of the fittest sounds, chosen by us the consumer? Does Darwin's theory of natural selection apply to more than just life on the planet? The idea of survival of the fittest and cultural evolution can be applied to many aspects of our lives; from fashion to the naming of our children. In a world of digital sampling evolutionary biologist, Professor Armand Leroi of Imperial College and his colleagues have designed an experiment to see if they can create the perfect song by asking individuals to choose which tunes survive and reproduce to create new tunes and which ones die out. If they can do this, where does that leave today's musical producers and composers? Do we still need a trained mind to compose truly amazing music? Armand Leroi discusses the idea that music evolves with evolutionary biologists Dr Luke Rendell of St Andrews University and Professor Mark Pagel of Reading University, composer Dr Martin Parker of Edinburgh University, and composer Aphrodite Raickopoulou.