Style and Supervenience :: Technology Computers Computer Essays

Style and Supervenience ABSTRACT: Cope's Computers and Musical Style (1991) describes a computer program that allegedly can represent and replicate musical styles solely on the basis of compositions that have been entered into it. If this claim is correct, then it must be that an oeuvre ¡Ã‚ ¦s stylistic characteristics locally supervene on its textual features, which roughly means that its stylistic properties are entirely determined by its textual properties. In my paper I argue that stylistic properties do not locally supervene on textual properties, and thus that neither Cope ¡Ã‚ ¦s program nor any other that essentially works like it can represent or replicate styles. Cope (1991) describes a computer program that allegedly can represent and replicate musical styles solely on the basis of compositions that have been entered into it (ix, xi ¡Xall page-references are to Cope 1991). If this claim is correct, then it must be that an oeuvre ¡Ã‚ ¦s stylistic characteristics locally supervene on its textual features, which roughly means that its stylistic properties are entirely determined by its textual properties. This paper argues that stylistic properties do not locally supervene on textual properties, and thus that neither Cope ¡Ã‚ ¦s program nor any other that essentially works like it can represent or replicate styles. 1. Cope's Composing Computer David Cope is a composer and music theorist who got interested in the applications of computer science to music. The direct cause of his interest was a composer ¡Ã‚ ¦s block; this made him turn to computer programming in the hope to find a  ¡Ã‚ ¥composing partner ¡Ã‚ ¦ (18). Eventually his search resulted in a program he termed Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI). Let me briefly sketch what EMI does and how it works. What EMI does is easily explained: musical data, like for instance a number of Mozart piano-sonatas, are (in coded form) fed into the computer, which then outputs new musical material. This new material is then hoped to be and, according to Cope, also often is, in the style of the music that was entered. How the program works is not so easily explained, but the following simplified account will do for the purposes of this paper (cf. 152ff for details). The two most important components of EMI are a pattern-matcher and a so-called Augmented Transition Network. The first searches for common patterns in the works that have gone into the computer, and stores these in a  ¡Ã‚ ¥style dictionary ¡Ã‚ ¦ (together with a weight, indicating how  ¡Ã‚ ¥common ¡Ã‚ ¦ they are).