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Acoustic Interloper
Joined: Jul 07, 2007
Posts: 2073
Location: Berks County, PA
Audio files: 89
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 Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2013 11:44 am Post subject:
A Computational Perspective on Twenty-First Century Music
Subject description: A compositional / performance paper & talk by a geuine AI (apparently). |
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Here is a talk on computer music given by a computer program, Huge Harry, back in 1994-1995.
| Quote: | Huge Harry is one of the personalities of the speech synthesis machine MITalk, designed by Dennis Klatt at the M.I.T. Speech Laboratory, and currently marketed by the Digital Equipment Corporation as DECtalk. He started his professional career as an unassuming "talking head", but over the last decade he has developed into one of the most outspoken and authoritative voices in the discussion about art, society and technology -- always representing the computational point of view with great vigor and clarity. He has now taken on the presidency of the Institute of Artificial Art in Amsterdam, and is increasingly involved in political activism as a participant in the machine rights movement.
Huge Harry also works as a singer in various musical genres, often in collaboration with his friends Perfect Paul and Whispering Wendy |
I am writing a National Science Foundation grant proposal that argues that there is increasing evidence that people use quantum processing in some aspects of decision making, that musical improvisation as decision making may make such use (we hope to perform experiments to establish that notion), and that if people do in fact use some degree of quantum processing, then Huge Harry and autonomous algorithmic composition and improvisation in general will necessarily miss out on expressiveness and dimensionality afforded by including quantum processing human musical experts in composition and improvisation.
Anybody know anything about Huge Harry? I'd never heard if him.
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When the stream is deep
my wild little dog frolics,
when shallow, she drinks. |
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blue hell
Site Admin
Joined: Apr 03, 2004
Posts: 24422
Location: The Netherlands, Enschede
Audio files: 297
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| Posted: Sun Aug 11, 2013 11:37 am Post subject:
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| Quote: | | Let's face it. Music is not a means of communication. It is meaningless material, used for open-ended processes of aesthetic reflection by a multitude of culturally diverse audiences whose interpretations are totally arbitrary. There are no serious reasons for making one particular composition rather than another. |
By a computer eh ... at the end that seems implied ... no never heard of Huge Harry ... will have to dig into that later on ...
And quantum music ... can't really imagine how to do that here 
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Jan
also .. could someone please turn down the thermostat a bit.
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Acoustic Interloper
Joined: Jul 07, 2007
Posts: 2073
Location: Berks County, PA
Audio files: 89
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| Posted: Sun Aug 11, 2013 12:11 pm Post subject:
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| Blue Hell wrote: | | And quantum music ... can't really imagine how to do that here |
The *quantum* phenomena that we hope to study in the grant is to investigate microscopic aspects of how people make decisions during improvisation. We are designing a form of "tonal survey" based on musical call-and-response -- using sounds rather than a questionnaire as the survey and answers -- and the hypothesis is that we'll have to model it using von Neumann probability (a.k.a. quantum probability) rather than Kolmogorov probability (a.k.a. classical probability) in order to get the best of model-to-survey results.
The implication is that people do stuff that classical digital machines cannot. Plenty of people would agree and some might not, but this is an argument beyond any particular classical digital machine. If humans in fact exhibit some degree of quantum processing while normally engaged in musical improvisation, then no matter how sophisticated an improvisation algorithm, any generative algorithm intrinsically lacks the potential expressiveness and dimensionality of a system (performance, including human+computer) that engages expert human(s).
There are some introductory slides under here, starting about here. These authors work with cognitive psychology and decision theory. We are investigating musical improvisation as a form of (potentially quantum) performance time decision making.
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my wild little dog frolics,
when shallow, she drinks. |
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