The musical virtuosity of AI composers

Lessons from David Cope’s Experiments in Musical Intelligence

As someone who is constantly trying to convince people of the wave of AI I believe is coming, I find that a lot of people— both lay persons and the tech savvy — struggle to accept that machines will soon be able to engage in complex creative endeavors. This is a completely understandable resistance, and I too feel the force of this gut feeling that there are certain things no computer will ever be able to replicate. Sure, they might be able to perform rapid calculations and analyze patterns in massive amounts of data, but how can these uncomprehending devices ever perform those feats of creativity and genius that are the pinnacle of human civilization? But reality, as usual, is stranger than we can imagine.

After creating some bland variations on his earlier work, he decided to apply his program to the canon of classical music, and ended up producing stunning compositions in the styles of the greats.

Here’s Vivaldi:

Bach:

And Chopin:

Perhaps a professional musicologist will be able to tell at once that these are fakes, but to my amateur ears they sound just as transcendent as any of the canonical works.

This is huge because we all associate machines and artificial intelligence with speed and mathematical computations, while keeping the artistic creations in a quite distinct category, where it is assumed machine learning cannot really compete. But Cope shows that this might not quite be true.

It is simply no longer feasible to think that the coming AI revolution will simply be an increase in speed of already existing processes, since it is by now clear that deep changes will have to follow in how we think about the world and the role of humans in it. Many creative pursuits are already being influenced and impacted by AI, and this trend is only going to intensify. Every person and every field needs to take seriously the writing on the wall, and try to find constructive ways to work alongside the coming technological changes.

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