Along the same lines, the reason why Jazz music was so popular was be cause the head establishes the territory (the regular pattern to be expected) and the improvisational section was the adventure (the area of free expression / creativity). ~PM
Date: Sat, 30 Nov 2013 00:51:30 -0600 Subject: Re: [agi] Composing music and other creative exercises From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Steve - With respect to creativity, one description immediately comes to mind - that of Jürgen Schmidhuber ( http://www.idsia.ch/~juergen/creativity.html ) : Why are some musical pieces more interesting or aesthetically rewarding than others? ...The observer (creator) of the data is interested in melodies that are unfamiliar enough to contain somewhat unexpected harmonies or beats etc., but familiar enough to allow for quickly recognizing the presence of a new learnable regularity or compressibility in the sound stream: a novel pattern! ... The interesting or aesthetically rewarding musical and other subsequences are precisely those with previously unknown yet learnable types of regularities, because they lead to compressor improvements. The boring patterns are those that are either already perfectly known or arbitrary or random, or whose structure seems too hard to understand. With respect to your distinction between "creativity" and "deviant genius", perhaps the definition of "great skill" should be reexamined. Athletes use drugs and technologically improved equipment to enhance performance. Likewise, musicians and singers use analogous resources, e.g. to stay on pitch. Are they considered more skilled as a result of such enhancement? Should we consider these enhancements differently than we would eyeglasses, hearing aids, or prosthetics? Should a smart phone be considered a similar extension of what is defined as a person's abilities, thus making us all chess masters with the appropriate app downloaded? We have been doing this to some degree for over a century when checking our watch in response to "Do you know what time it is?" One may argue that the ability of computers to construct novel compositions - according to Schmidhuber's description - raises that bar of what should be considered "great skill". The "deviant genius" of a Lennon/McCartney or Miles Davis crosses a threshold separating "creativity" and "innovation". Following this logic, one may argue - by applying from a well worn meme - that "innovation" is the new "creativity". Consider a related thread that also touches on creative ability - "Co-authorship: are machines coming?" that appeared on ResearchGate last year ( http://www.researchgate.net/post/Co-authorship_are_machines_coming ) On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 4:31 PM, Steve Richfield <[email protected]> wrote: Mike, et al, In the distant past I have worked with creative composers to create two very different programs to compose music. The logic of these programs was more in deciding what NOT to do than what TO do, so there was generous use of a random number generator, followed by logic that rejected most selections. A common situational challenge was that there was no acceptable next note, so time to back up or start over. While this fit the "programmed" model you so like to reject, it ALSO reflected the mindset of most composers. Sure there is an occasional maverick who deviates from one of the many patterns, and in so doing creates a new pattern, like switching between a major and a minor key in mid-piece. However, people like these are in the EXTREME minority - about as rare as malfunctioning computers, so you could run less creative programs on many computers, and sometimes be surprised over what a malfunction might bring. For a good discussion of these deviations, you might watch the now-unfolding story aboutf the lawsuits over the piece Blurred Lines, which is a highly creative piece that borrows from another piece, but in ways that are so subtle as to probably NOT violate (present) copyright laws. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyDUC1LUXSU Apparently, creative music CAN be composed by an expert system designed to do that. The amazingly simple rules for such systems come from centuries of creative composers. Such a computer would probably NOT create these deviations, but then again, neither do most composers. It appears that creativity comes at more than one level. A computer might be able to solve all equations that people can now solve, but never push back that frontier to solve equations that people can NOT now solve. Similarly, a computer might be able to create music as good as a graduate from a major music school, but never create the likes of Blurred Lines. without something else first pointing in that direction, which is what the lawsuits are all about. Robin Thicke readily admits that he was actually listening to Marvin Gaye's music as he was composing Blurred Lines,but claims that Blurred Lines is NEW in ways that do NOT tread on copyrights. My conclusion is that computers can now already be creative, but there are limitations that apply equally to most people. We CAN now program great skill, but not yet program deviant genius. Any thoughts? 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