The Official Emily Howell Appreciation Thread

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

From her upcoming score...

Really lovely.

Here's an article about her process. It's really refreshing to read about a new and modern composer who is really classically well versed.

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

That is a very disingenuous post Blume!

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

Her grandmother (stage name Emmy) did some really lovely work as well, but supposedly she never was able to afford an orchestra to play her compositions. But even with samples, she's done some terrific work:

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[KK 3,307]

The machines are taking over... I say it's time we fight back! Fight for your family, fight for your country, fight FOR MANKIND!!!!!!!!!!!

We must turn to our dear Lord and Saviour John Williams to lead the rebellion against the machines!

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

Besides crazy rebellion stories...it's a really interesting article. Very big discussions.

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the

without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.

As Cope sees it, Bach merely had an extraordinary ability to manipulate notes in a way that made people who heard his music have intense emotional reactions. He describes his sometimes flabbergasting conversations with Hofstadter: “I’d pull down a score and say, ‘Look at this. What’s on this page?’ And he’d say, ‘That’s Beethoven, that’s music of great spirit and great soul.’ And I’d say, ‘Wow, isn’t that incredible! To me, it’s a bunch of black dots and black lines on white paper! Where’s the soul in there?’”

Cope thinks the old cliché of beauty in the eye of the beholder explains the situation well: “The dots and lines on paper are merely triggers that set things off in our mind, do all the wonderful things that give us excitement and love of the music, and we falsely believe that somewhere in that music is the thing we’re feeling,” he says. “I don’t know what the hell ‘soul’ is. I don’t know that we have any of it. I’m looking to get off on life. And music gets me off a lot of the time. I really, really, really am moved by it. I don’t care who wrote it.”

At one Santa Cruz concert, the program notes neglected to mention that Emily Howell wasn’t a human being, and a chemistry professor and music aficionado in the audience described the performance of a Howell composition as one of the most moving experiences of his musical life. Six months later, when the same professor attended a lecture of Cope’s on Emily Howell and heard the same concert played from a recording, Cope remembers him saying, “You know, that’s pretty music, but I could tell absolutely, immediately that it was computer-composed. There’s no heart or soul or depth to the piece.”

That sentiment — present in many recent articles, blog posts and comments about Emily Howell — frustrates Cope. “Most of what I’ve heard [and read] is the same old crap,” he complains. “It’s all about machines versus humans, and ‘aren’t you taking away the last little thing we have left that we can call unique to human beings — creativity?’ I just find this so laborious and uncreative.”

Emily Howell isn’t stealing creativity from people, he says. It’s just expressing itself. Cope claims it produced musical ideas he never would have thought about. He’s now convinced that, in many ways, machines can be more creative than people. They’re able to introduce random notions and reassemble old elements in new ways, without any of the hang-ups or preconceptions of humanity.

“We are so damned biased, even those of us who spend all our lives attempting not to be biased. Just the mere fact that when we like the taste of something, we tend to eat it more than we should. We have our physical body telling us things, and we can’t intellectually govern it the way we’d like to,” he says.

In other words, humans are more robotic than machines. “The question,” Cope says, “isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”

[Neimoidian 14]

There are plenty of good, well-trained composers out there, but studio executives and most of directors don't want original, artsy-fartsy scores in their movies anymore. Heck, neither do most of moviegoers.

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[crocodile 7,979]

So is this the next Angela Morley?

Karol

[Brónach 1,301]

Heck, neither do most of moviegoers.

The moviegoers don't know, don't care.

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[A24 4,326]

A machine? That was a real piano.

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[A24 4,326]

No, I only listened to the music.

[Jay 37,271]

LOL!!!!

[A24 4,326]

So what's the deal?

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[A24 4,326]

What? Not for King Leonidas' sake?

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

I guess I was optimistic thinking this thread would spawn some amazing conversation.

- Blumen who's realized his last dozen threads started have all completely failed. The end of a legend one hit wonder?

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[Jay 37,271]

So what's the deal?

Why not just read the article?

Since you refuse: Emily Howell is a software program, not a person

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

Everybody thinks you're talking about a person, so they don't give a shit. You shouldn't have played with that idea, Cauliflower Boy.

Challenge accepted. New thread title:

Emily Howell, a robot, shows how codified Western music is and how useless Western composers are

EXAGGERATED CONTROVERSY WILL SELL...RIGHT?

- Desperate Blume seeking validation

[BloodBoal 7,538]

Right.

[Incanus 5,713]

I am too scared to think further on the subject and am huddling in a dark corner wishing for sweet oblivion to wipe that article from my mind. The machines are taking over! The machines!

*possible more coherently formulated answer coming sometime in the future.

[A24 4,326]

So is the piano played by a robot? That would be mighty fantastic and futuristic.

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

The piano is played by David Cope I believe. The music is written entirely by a program (Emily Howell) that's been given all the rules and tendencies of Western music and its composers but that is also capable of breaking or bending those rules and learning and building new ways to write music outside of those formulas. AKA...she's creative.

The interesting point brought up in the article is, before people realize Emily Howell is a program they praise and swoon over how emotional and powerful and stirring the music is.

But once they are told Emily is a machine, they call the music soulless.

Musical soul and emotion, like beauty, it appears is in the eye of the beholder.

[Brónach 1,301]

I like its music. It's not particularly interesting, but most music produced by humans isn't necessarily so either.

Congrats to its creator. I hope sometimes down the road I can congratulate a robot and it will be able to appreciate my words. I guess I'm no technophobe. The difference would be that composing great stuff would be no effort for an A.I., while for human beings is complex and tiring, and not evrybody can do it, or even understand it.

[BloodBoal 7,538]

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

I've really been enjoying Howell's work this week...love the nostalgic melancholy in this one, like it's something out of a Hitchcock movie or something.

[Dixon Hill 4,232]

If Emily Howell had been programmed with better chops, she'd be writing music like Williams instead of this crap. I hope she'll get over it.

[BLUMENKOHL 1,068]

She has dabbled a bit in the Brian Eno style:

I don't think she's quite as strong at it. Too much humanity required to write that kind of music.

[Dixon Hill 4,232]

I really like Land Of Stone. Lovely stuff. Good thread all around.

[#SnowyVernalSpringsEternal 10,265]

Yuck!

[shinelucid 0]

I'm I the only one who still thinks that these are still David Cope's compositions that were created through his programming skills, I would assume that all his musical knowledge was translated into a program in order for it to be able to create decent compositions, you can think of the program as a tool that helps David Cope to compose it just happens to be able to create completely decent pieces of music that he could instead just adjust them a little bit more to perfect them and then say they were his own pieces that would end up befitting him and other musicians in their creative process instead of just straight up throwing the damn thing in the trash bin.