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Re: meet the musical future!
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