Composing by computer

THESE DAYS, anyone with a computer can be a composer. Sort of. Give a piece of commercial software such as Magenta, developed by Google, the first few notes of a song, and it will make something merrily tuneful out of them. Tuneful, but not sophisticated. At least, that is the view of Gerhard Widmer of Johannes Kepler University, in Linz, Austria.In Dr Widmer’s opinion, “what they create may contain certain statistical properties. It’s not dissonant, but it’s not actually music...It would create a piece that would last three days because it has no notion of what it wants to do. It doesn’t know that things need an end, a beginning, and something in-between.” He thinks he can do better. He wants to use artificial intelligence to explore how toying with a listener’s expectations affects the perception of music, and then to employ that knowledge to create software which can produce something more akin to Beethoven than “Baa Baa Black Sheep”. That means giving computers an ability to perceive subtleties they cannot currently detect but might, using the latest techniques, be able to learn. To this end, Dr Widmer is running a project called “Whither music?”—a title borrowed from a lecture series given at Harvard University in 1973 by , a celebrated 20th-century composer.