Mastodawn

Will Landecker May 13, 2025

A year later, in 2006, I handed in my undergraduate thesis on training probabilistic generative models to recreate style and structure from different corpora of data. It had been a fun year of studying quirky math and algorithms. I was pretty sure I'd never think about the stuff again.

RIP David Cope. For many of us, yours was the first example of algorithmically generated creations that felt like they came from a human. What a wild future you nudged us toward.

#RIP #DavidCope

शून्यता May 9, 2025

I sat down at my piano and I played one of EMI’s mazurkas “in the style of Chopin.” It didn’t sound exactly like Chopin, but it sounded enough like Chopin, and like coherent music, that I just felt deeply troubled.

Ever since I was a child, music has thrilled me and moved me to the very core. And every piece that I love feels like it’s a direct message from the emotional heart of the human being who composed it. It feels like it is giving me access to their innermost soul. And it feels like there is nothing more human in the world than that expression of music. Nothing. The idea that pattern manipulation of the most superficial sort can yield things that sound as if they are coming from a human being’s heart is very, very troubling. I was just completely thrown by this. (d h) #DavidCope #EMI #ExperimentsInMusicalIntelligence