Re: meet the musical future!

[Bruce Petherick <bpetherick@SHAW.CA>]

At 13:50 21/03/2002 -0500, you wrote:
> Remember
> the wonderful liner notes on the back of Gould's album of the Liszt piano
> transcription of the Beethoven symphony? The Dakota psychiatrist accused
> GG of megalomania for wanting to be an entire symphony orchestra. And the
> Socialist reviewer criticized him for stealing the bread from the mouths
> of 60 musicians and their families.
>  
> On "Saturday Night
> Live," the talentless lounge singer Bill Murray used to point to his
> cheesy, annoying little percussion machine and ask the audience to give a
> big round of applause to "the Univox 4000."
>  
> We all laughed that a box
> might ever replace a human musician (even a drummer, a stretch both for
> "human" and "musician").
>  
> Let laughter cease. I present,
> without further comment, The Future:

        

I wouldn't
be to concerned - there has been "automatic" accompanists for
at least 10 years. Roger Dannenberg at Carnegie-Mellon has been
developing an intelligent accompanist for years. I believe that it is now
available commercially. David Cope's work cross into automatic
accompaniment. I would also be remiss not to mention "Toward a
Computer Jazz Accompanying program" B Petherick M.Mus LaTrobe
1993.

        

All of
these programs depend on there being a set of musical rules that define
accompaniment - a assertion that I don't believe. The use of Markovian
chains can be somewhat amusing - I was given some of Dannenberg;s code to
run and I set the computer to believe that a piece went at a certain
tempo. In performance, i deliberately played much slower - the program
just could not get out its internal tempo loop.

        

Although I
haven't heard this particular program, I can state with some conviction
that, although the results _can_ be very impressive, they will _never_,
_never_ replace a human - unless we all change our aesthetic perception
of "accompaniment". This last statement does worry me, but I
can be a pessimist when it comes to technology making musical decisions.
[For example see the article in today's Globe and Mail].

Bruce Petherick
24 hour Emergency Musicologist
bpetherick@shaw.ca