More recently, systems have been created which take input from actual music, even a live improvisation, and can create a meaningful response in real time. The computer takes the previous improvisation as input, performs transformations on it lightening fast and then gives a performance of its own nano seconds later. It’s these systems that are fooling experts, especially when they’re combined with a knowledge base such as a hundreds of licks which can also have transformations performed on those patterns as well.
The programmers don’t need to tell the computer to test for fitness before the computer puts out the music. If good music is used to initiate the system, then good music is coming out. Initiating an expert system with a fractal or a second order Markov chain just does not produce music as good as if it’s initiated with quality music. In that case, the computer is doing almost exactly the same thing that you’re favorite guitar god did to come up with all their albums. The computer listened to existing music and then changed it.
It’s not exactly the same though. A human’s musical cortex can be FAR more flexible and nuanced than a computer’s. And can process at a high level unconsciously and even while a person sleeps. But to get it that way takes tons of practice, intelligence and the capacity to memorize a lot of music. Yes, a computer can become an expert but it cannot do it at the same LEVEL of expertise that is possible by some very special humans and it cannot become an unconscious competent the way people can. If you ask some experts to teach you how to compose music the same way they do it, they can’t tell you. Or they say it’s all intuition. It’s not going too far to say that they actually consciously forgot how they learned what they do. They literally can’t remember. It was a lot of work and it has all been internalized. It’s proprioceptive now. Most of what they learned bypasses all of their conscious thought processes and takes a direct channel from the subconscious. It’s a huge benefit to them as a composer because everything has been streamlined. If you ask a computer how it’s composing music, there’s never a point in time when it can’t tell you exactly what it’s doing. That’s a huge benefit if you’re a student.
Experts are operating in the stratosphere and computers and beginning students are operating in the dust. If the computer was a beginning student, would the expert start at the level of the stratosphere in his lessons to it? A better approach might be to ask the question, “What parameters would an expert educator and musician give to a novice or intermediate student so that they can create a lot of good music quickly and easily but not get into too much trouble?”
It just needs to be good ENOUGH. If you demand the optimum, then yes, you need to study hard at Berklee for several years and pay the tuition. If you can double your investment after graduation it might be worth it. For some people it will work. For others it won’t. If you want to save time and test the market first with a smaller investment of time and money, yet still have your music take you and your listeners somewhere interesting then this course has what you need.
For the purpose of this course, what the real music initiated expert systems are doing is good enough for us at this point in time, until you can put in the practice to memorize a lot of music and acquire other compositional skills. Even then, there’s no guarantee that you’re musical cortex will create the desired output, although naturally it’s always fun to try.
The Evolutionary Approach
In the evolutionary approach the programmers say that being close to the style of songs that were put in is not good enough for high quality and creative new music. So, they extract sequences of notes that are conceived as melodic words within that style. Using them puts a limit on notes that can be adjacent to each other.
The “genes” of two different songs or two different styles can be mixed such as Bach and Jimi Hendrix and during the breeding process the computer introduces musically meaningful operations such as retrograde, inversion, transposition, augmentation, etc... This overcomes the truly horrible results with other methods that introduced "corruption" through random procedures. The genes in this case are the melodic and rhythmic series which are extracted from the music and not DNA.
The fitness of the results are judged by their adherence to voice leading rules. Some of the other rules used for evaluating fitness are the desired level of syncopation, melodic density, beat repetitions, the number of new notes, maximum interval sizes, the number of changes of direction, and types of note transitions. They also use "musical grammars" to narrow down the number of results that humans are given to pass or fail. Then about 1/3 of the weakest carriers of the material are killed off so the music would theoretically get better and better over time.
I wanted to say that I've met some people who resist thinking about their music consciously like the plague. Some people believe that doing it without thinking is best. But for many people, while they're trying to do that, their career is floundering and wasting precious time just like a lot of us have done. Some people are unconscious competents (they consistently write good music without thinking about it too much), some are conscious competents (who are good at explaining what the unconscious competents are doing) and some are incompetent (and need no introduction).
The unconscious competents can't tell us what they're doing. Hopefully that's who you're listening to. The conscious competents can tell us what the unconscious competents are doing. Hopefully they were our teachers. The incompetents hopefully aren't recording or teaching and god help that they're not us.
A few people have difficulty becoming competent through the conscious method. But it doesn't hurt them as a musician to try. Their intuition hasn’t gone anywhere just because they switched their brains on. If the unconscious method isn’t working for them, ragging on the people who study it consciously isn’t helping them one bit.
If you want to be a brain surgeon, you don't just wing it. You study hard everything that there is to know about it. If you have the instincts from listening and playing a lot of great music that causes you to write good music all the time or that allows you to break the "rules" for a good reason yet still come up with excellent music, then analyzing too much might get in the way. Most people aren't the Beatles.
For you to use the transformational methods that I’m recommending, it implies being able to either get your hands on a song book; in guitar tablature, traditional notation or some other way of presenting it. Or being able to transcribe the sounds you hear into notes on a page in some kind of notation. What kind of notation you use is not important. Actually, for some people, it’s not even necessary to use notation.
There’s a story about the origins of Jazz Bebop music. My friend Leandro from Argentina who I met in Bali told me an anecdote that he heard from an American musician. The story goes that the players who used to perform Bop had played the tunes so much and knew them so well, they would play musical games from the tunes when hanging out with their friends after a gig. They would challenge each other to try and play a song they knew backwards and if that was too easy, then they would try to play it backwards three times faster. According to him, that became the origins of Bebop. Clearly, they didn’t use pencil and paper to do that.
These transformational methods are what allowed them to come up with a new style of music and allowed me to produce more music than I needed for my first album. But I didn’t use an expert computer system. I did it on paper by hand. It was fast, fun and easy. I recorded a CD of metal gongs and xylophone music called "Garden of Contemplation" with Aparna Panshikar, a vocalist who was world music artist of the year in both Korea and India. It was under my Traditional Independent Record Label: Gongchime.
My arrangement of the "Kang Ding Love Song" and my composition "Vietnamese Melody" were forwarded at the largest independent A&R Company in the world, Taxi, to a Fitness and Yoga Meditation listing. In 2006 my tunes Vietnamese Melody and Champa were in the top 10 on the website Broadjam in the Asian category for several months. In 2007 my tune "Visiting Shaman" was in the #1 position in the Asian chart. Later my tunes Vietnamese Melody and Champa were accepted into a music library available to TV and film producers.
So, I’m convinced these methods work because they already worked for me and worked for the creators of Bebop. They can work for you too. Have a look at the compositional chart I used to create the music that was both forwarded and accepted.
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