> WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE DAY THE MUSIC DIED > > In the new book "The Invisible Future: The Seamless Integration of > Technology Into Everyday Life" (edited by our friend Peter Denning), the > well-known cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter offers these thoughts > about the automated composition of music: > > "What worries me about computer simulations is not the idea that we > ourselves might be machines; I have long been convinced of the truth of > that. What troubles me is the notion that things that touch me at my > deepest > core--pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct > soul-to-soul messages--might be effectively produced by mechanisms > thousands > if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery > that gives rise to a human soul. This prospect, rendered most vivid and > perhaps even near-seeming by the development of EMI [Experiments in > Musical > Intelligence], worries me enormously, and in my more gloomy moods, I have > articulated three causes for pessimism, listed below: > > "1. Chopin (for example) is a lot shallower than I had ever thought; > > "2. Music is a lot shallower than I had ever thought; > > "3. The human soul/mind is a lot shallower than I had ever thought... > > "Let me comment on these. Pertaining to (1), since I have been moved > to > the core for my entire life by Chopin pieces, if it turns out that EMI can > churn out piece after piece that 'speaks like Chopin' to me, then I would > be > thereby forced to retrospectively reassess all the meaning that I have > been > convinced of detecting in Chopin's music, because I could no longer have > faith that it could only have come from a deep, human source. I would have > to accept the fact that Frederic Chopin might have been merely a > tremendously fluent artisan rather than the deeply felt artist whose heart > and soul I'd been sure I knew ever since I was a child. Indeed, I could no > longer be sure of anything I'd felt about Frederic Chopin, the human > being, > from hearing his music. That loss would be an inconceivable source of > grief > to me. > > "In a sense, the loss just described would not be worse than the loss > incurred by (2), since Chopin has always symbolized the power of music as > a > whole to me. Nonetheless, I suppose that having to chuck ALL composers out > the window is somehow a bit more troubling than having to chuck just ONE > of > them out. > > "The loss described in (3), of course, would be the ultimate affront > to > human dignity. It would be the realization that all of the 'computing > power' > that resides in a human brain's 100 billion neurons and its roughly 10 > quadrillion synaptic connections can be bypassed with a handful of > state-of-the-art chips, and that all that is needed to produce the most > powerful artistic outburst of all time (and many more of equal power, if > not > greater) is a nanoscopic fraction thereof--AND that it can be > accomplished, > thank you very much, by an entity that knows nothing of knowing, seeing, > hearing, tasting, living, dying, struggling, suffering, aging, yearning, > singing, dancing, fighting, kissing, hoping, feaqring, winning, losing, > crying, laughing, loving, longing, or caring. > > "Although Kala Pierson and many others may hail its coming as 'truly > a > thing of beauty,' the day when music is finally and irrevocably reduced to > a > syntactic pattern and pattern alone will be, to my old fashioned way of > looking at things, a very dark day indeed." > > See http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0071382240/newsscancom/ for > "The > Invisible Future: The Seamless Integration of Technology Into Everyday > Life" > -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We donate all revenue from > our > book recommendations to adult literacy action programs.) > >
