When most of us think about a machine composing musical pieces, we think of primitive songs coming out of a HAL 9000 that could be suitable for a child’s toy, but nothing that music lovers would actually enjoy. That’s because most of us haven’t heard of Emily Howell. No, that’s not a person—it’s the name of a computer program written by University of California, Santa Cruz professor David Cope that, after nearly three decades of work, is about to release, uh, “her” first CD through Centaur Records.
Cope is Dickerson Emeriti Professor at UCSC—he attempted to retire years ago because he didn’t want to go to meetings anymore—teaching graduate courses in music composition and computer-assisted composition. Cope is also an Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Xiamen University in China and is often ascribed as a computer scientist, though he insists that he is a music professor first, not a CS professor. However, given the work he has done on Emily Howell and “her” predecessor, EMI, it’s clear that he has managed to mesh the two in ways that go far beyond a musical computer program.
How it all got started
You name the composer and EMI could analyze his works to spit out a new piece that sounded just like that composer had written it himself. Except he hadn’t; a computer had.
Emily wasn’t just born out of Cope’s mind as a genius application that could compose pieces that compete with the likes of modern-day composers. Cope, a composer himself, said his work actually started around 1980 when someone commissioned him for an opera and he found himself facing mean case of composer’s block. A friend who worked in artificial intelligence lightheartedly suggested he write a program to help him complete the opera. He had done some programming before—“I had to work on those large IBM mainframes with the paper cards that went in; there was no visual complement at all”—so he gave it a go.
