David Cope: Virtual Mozart: Experiments in Musical Intelligence.(Review)

Compact disc, 1999, CD CRC 2452; available from Centaur Records, Inc., 136 St. Joseph Street, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70802, USA; telephone (225) 336-4877; fax (225) 336-9678; electronic mail info@centaurrecords.com; World Wide Web www.centaurrecords.com

Beginning in the early 1980s, David Cope, who teaches at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC), has been developing his LISP-based computer system, Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI), which combines analysis and compositional processes. His system has been extensively described in his two books, Computers and Musical Style (Madison, Wisconsin: A-R Editions, 1991) and Experiments in Musical Intelligence (A-R Editions, 1996), as well as in numerous articles.

His goal has been to create software that will write music in specific styles. Mr. Cope's analyses are based on hierarchical techniques drawing on the Schenkerian approach and on Noam Chomsky's generative grammar of natural languages. Mr. Cope's EMI, as well as his Simple Analytic Recombinancy Algorithm (SARA), can analyze each component of a composition for its hierarchical musical function, match patterns for "signals" of a certain composer's style, and reassemble the parts sensitively, using techniques drawn from natural language processing. Part of the analysis process involves a pattern-searching algorithm that, in contrast to such algorithms by other authors, seeks patterns without any preconceived notion of their content. This implies that the analyst does not need to know which patterns are supposed to be matched. The author himself writes that: "EMI employs a limited set of variables called controllers, which affix musical parameters to vague outlines within which patterns are accepted as viably recognizable" (Experiments in Musical Intelligence, p. 36). All analytical results, stored in object system files, can be recombined in the eventual composition process. To ensure a logical order of the recombination process, Mr. Cope has programmed "augmented transition networks," used successfully since the 1970s for automatic language generation. The many compositions generated on the basis of analytical results are proof of Mr. Cope's success. Some of these, in the style of Palestrina, Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms, Joplin, Stravinsky, ...