Bach by Design

Name: Ragnar Digital, LLC
Price range: $

David Cope

1994

Music/Sound

The Listening Room

Description

Bach by Design presents music composed not by J. S. Bach but by Experiments in Musical Intelligence (EMI, or “Emmy”), a computer program devised by composer David Cope. Stifled by creative block while writing an opera in the 1980s, Cope turned to algorithms, a long-standing interest since his 1970s experiments with IBM punch-card computing. EMI analyzed scores stored in its database and generated new works in their manner, allowing Cope to probe the elusive nature of style itself. The tracks were performed on a Yamaha Disklavier, an electronic player piano, whose mechanical stiffness drew more commentary from critics than EMI’s innovative compositional methods did. Yet in live “Turing Test” performances, listeners who were asked whether snippets of music were composed by EMI or Bach often made the incorrect choice. Bach by Design is an important event in computer music history, encapsulating Cope’s inquiry into authorship, creativity, and the computational analysis of style.