The trouble with computers…
As a composer, I read No humans required (June) with interest, but I remain unconvinced that a computer programme will produce a great musical work any time soon. Most masterpieces are such because their composers ingeniously break compositional rules. For instance, how would a computer come up with the unexpected and breathtakingly novel transition into the recapitulation that Beethoven employed in his Eroica Symphony, wherein the main tune is foreshadowed in the tonic key but accompanied by harmonies of the dominant seventh? Even if a programmer were clever enough to get a computer to compose such moments, he would essentially become the composer of the work. As it also took humans to judge that only 10-20 per cent of the music written by Aiva is ‘good’, that implies that a computer itself will never ‘know’ the quality of music it has produced. David Deboor, IN, US