According to this article (it's long, if you don't have much time/effort summary there's a summary here), there's a computer that composes music that you would not distinguish from music composed by humans. The article is examining people's responses to this - many do not like the concept that music, a very emotional, personal experience for some, can be produced by algorithms and still pull the heartstrings. I
I was wondering what people think about this. Is there emotion inherent to music or is it something added by the listener? Would you listen to music composed by a computer? What makes music special for you?
I find this very interesting. Exactly what I think about it, I'm not sure. The depressing truth often seems to be with these things that everything we take as being distinctly human, emotional, intellectual etc can ultimately be reduced to the mechanical, the mathematical, the logical.
When computers are "creative", I image they're following set rules and code on the one hand, but then making 'choices' (i.e. selecting from millions of possibilities that are acceptable within the rules set) and stringing them all together to create something new. It sounds cold and artificial. But then, when it boils down to creativity isolated from emotion, if there were ever such a thing, that's what we do as humans too. We understand the rules, the code of the medium (whether music, painting or whatever - we can mix them up, but we still understand what they represent and how they work), which is set down by culture and education, and we combine thousands of 'micro-choices' in order to finish with something that makes sense to us.
The difficult bit is understanding how emotion is connected to creativity. Does emotion fuel creativity, or do we sort of attach emotion on afterwards? If it's the latter, I guess we can find any kind of creativity potentially emotional, even stuff created by robots. Maybe emotional response to creativity is learnt. When we hear a slow song with strings and piano and melancholy lyrics, we have learnt to respond to it with sadness. Or maybe it's even more built into us than that, on a genetic level. It's kinda uncomfortable for us to think about it so mechanically, but maybe we're more like robots than we'd like to think!
