From my early days: Graphix 5, from 1977
David Cope is a Professor Emeritus of Music at the University of California at Santa Cruz (my alma mater). In a segment on Radio Lab over the weekend, he described an extraordinary project he began in 1981 when he was suffering from a serious case of composer’s block. After a conversation with a computer scientist, Cope developed the idea that it might be possible to use the computational power of a computer to identify the essential DNA of his compositional style and then aid him in assembling the opera he hoped to write.
A program called EMI, Experiments in Musical Intelligence, was the result of that effort. The description of how this “tool” works is fascinating. While he originally intended to use it for help with his own musical development, he quickly saw its potential to parse and uncover the patterning in all music.
The first results of this effort seemed lifeless to Cope. But with tweaking and adjustments, the results became quite extraordinary. It seems that there is a signature in the structure of a composition, and that signature can be used for propagation.
In Cope’s words:
My idea was that every work of music contains a set of instructions for creating different but highly related replications of itself. These instructions, interpreted correctly, can lead to interesting discoveries about musical structure as well as, hopefully, create new instances of stylistically-faithful music.
My rationale for discovering such instructions was based, in part, on the concept of recombinancy. Recombinancy can be defined simply as a method for producing new music by recombining extant music into new logical successions…recombinancy appears everywhere as a natural evolutionary and creative process. All the great books in the English language, for example, are constructed from recombinations of the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Similarly, most of the great works of Western art music exist as recombinations of the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered scale and their octave equivalents. The secret lies not in the invention of new letters or notes but in the subtlety and elegance of their recombination.
Of course, simply breaking a musical work into smaller parts and randomly combining them into new orders almost certainly produces gibberish. Effective recombination requires extensive musical analysis and very careful recombination to be effective at even an elemental level no less the highly musical level of which I dreamed.
(The Radio Lab link above offers samples of music written using EMI by Cope as well as compositions “inspired” by the elemental DNA of Bach and other composers.)
This provokes my sense of what is signatory in art as well. Peter Schjeldahl wrote a piece in the New Yorker several years ago that has haunted me ever since. While suffering from dementia at the end of his life, de Kooning was still painting elementally de Kooning works. Which causes one to ask, where does style reside anyway? (I have also pondered the claim of neurologists who say a brain damaged person in the West can sing the happy birthday ditty even if they cannot speak or recognize their family members.) Researchers have tried to identify the fractal-like DNA of a Jackson Pollock painting—not without controversy, however—or those other small tells that end up determining the authenticity of a work of art.
On a more personal level, can you spot the signatory patterns in your own work? Looking back at my early efforts I see all sorts of patterns, proclivities, inclinations and tendencies that feel familiar to me now. Cope’s approach is scientific and my judgment is subjective, but the question is still floating for me.
More recent work: Sloycha, 2011
I wrote a blog post on just this subject last summer, because I felt I was returning to work I’d done as a student; that my character as an artist hadn’t truly changed: http://altoonsultan.blogspot.com/2011/07/do-we-have-innate-style.html
I’ve always mixed feelings when I read/hear of technological advances that can so efficiently calculate something so philosophically elusive as style, but then, what is to be gained by insisting that the artistic mind must remain mysterious?
I truly enjoy these thoughtful insights, and I am more mindful of the signatory patterns that seem to have perennial in my work as I paint further into my forties, and begin to feel the arcs of some full circles coming to bear.
Altoon, thanks so much for the link. The threads and themes in your work can be seen but also speak to something less obvious it seems to me as well. What is it that compels us? Sometimes that notion cannot be articulated but simply played out in a lifetime of work.
Janet, Cope comes across as a very humble guy, not an arrogant son of a bitch who thinks he’s cracked the code on creativity. He did talk about how enraged some people are by what he is doing with this tool, and he is quite gracious in describing their discomfort. For that reason I was not turned off by his presentation of his approach on Radio Labs and was able to get past my usual distrust of any mechanistic flattening of our creative lives.
One of the most compelling parts of the broadcast was when he played a sequence produced by his computer program that sounded lifeless and dead. Then he took that sequence of notes and gave it compositional form with voicing and dynamics. It was transformed into something quite beguiling. It left me feeling that this truly was a tool that helped him create his own work more efficiently but did not replace the mystery of his musical gifts.
Thanks for your comment, I appreciate your thoughts.
Fascinating stuff, indeed!
The research at MIT’s Media Lab has shown that when people remember nothing else, they do not forget music.
I’ve written several posts about painters with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia who took up the brush and painted as if it was the most natural thing. That painting also helped in mollifying that part of the brain where anger resided is impelling.
I truly understand this concept especially as it connects to the visual artist in the development of the artists signature- visual language that becomes their own – somehow that language develops over time and the links that become more apparent when examining a retrospect of the artist work.
Maureen, I’ll do a search on Writing Without Paper. I would really like to read what you have written about Alzheimer artists.
Marcia, do you think it is easier to see that evidence in your own work or the works of others?