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This is the home of award-winning composer and designer Jamie Klenetsky. Here, you will find Jamie's compositions and performances, web/graphic design portfolio, and biography. Jamie's blog, detailing her music, web, and personal lives, is below.
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Virtual Composer
An article on Ars Technica piqued my interest. It's about a composer/programmer who basically programmed a composition AI to produce pieces, and it's got me thinking, what should we consider to be "composition"?
I'm thinking about Steve Reich and his Phase Music concept. He would write some basic fragments, loop them at different times/tempi, and just let them run until he could pick out pieces that he liked. In Different Trains he used looped vocal samples in his composition. People praise Reich for his ideas. I'm wondering just how different this is. Reich essentially "programmed" notes, let an automated process do the rest, and then tweaked/choose what he wanted to use.
And if you think about it, we aren't creating new notes when we compose, the notes already exist, and we "program" them into pieces. After thinking about it, I believe that if a person does the programming himself, like this composer did, then it IS his creation, and should be considered to be a composition. However, if music is created using a program like Adobe Soundbooth, which can be used to pick a mood, theme, and it generates music for you, it shouldn't be considered a composition - the "writer" had no say in it whatsoever.
I'm no programmer, so I'll continue writing the old fashioned way - though on a computer - and although I get a sour taste in my mouth from the idea of an AI, it does make sense, and I admire the work this composer/programmer has done.
I'm thinking about Steve Reich and his Phase Music concept. He would write some basic fragments, loop them at different times/tempi, and just let them run until he could pick out pieces that he liked. In Different Trains he used looped vocal samples in his composition. People praise Reich for his ideas. I'm wondering just how different this is. Reich essentially "programmed" notes, let an automated process do the rest, and then tweaked/choose what he wanted to use.
And if you think about it, we aren't creating new notes when we compose, the notes already exist, and we "program" them into pieces. After thinking about it, I believe that if a person does the programming himself, like this composer did, then it IS his creation, and should be considered to be a composition. However, if music is created using a program like Adobe Soundbooth, which can be used to pick a mood, theme, and it generates music for you, it shouldn't be considered a composition - the "writer" had no say in it whatsoever.
I'm no programmer, so I'll continue writing the old fashioned way - though on a computer - and although I get a sour taste in my mouth from the idea of an AI, it does make sense, and I admire the work this composer/programmer has done.
Labels: music
posted by Jamie at
11:29 AM
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