--- Larry Price <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Wow! I hadn't heard of Professor Cope, and his > compositional macintosh > but I can't say I'm that surprised.
I'm not surprised at all. I've played with stuff like that for a few years now. I was (am?) on the "midi perl" list for a while and was playing with various Markov chain based little programs and getting very interesting results with very little effort. Markov chains listen to a variety of (or even one) input of data, and merely listen to the sequwnce of words/notes/whatever, and build tables that have probablities. So if "Once upon" is usually followed by "a", it can and will generate "Once upon a" and then guess for whatever often comes next from "upon a", maybe often coming up with "Once upon a time," but rarely coming with the "Once upon a mattress"... etc. In music, for example midi, it's possible to feed a bunch of style songs and it will generate reasonable sounding combos, and yet the 'science' is very simple. No, it's not _great_ music, but for almost zero music theory, it can sound quite cool. Add in more logic, teach it to recognize longer patterns, and other musical ideas, and I'm not surprised at all by the idea of a music program generating music that "sounds like" someone famous. True creativity is a VASTLY different thing, and no computer comes close to it. Seth __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/
