Food for Thought on a Summer Sunday Morning (and Music, too!)

You all know how much music gets played on this blog. Likewise, I also write about music and today I would like to bring your attention to this short, but very interesting, article on the future of music. Reproduced here without any permission, I hope you enjoy this piece. Thanks, I'm still on holidays.

Evolutionary music doesn't mean the death of the creator - by Victor Keegan



Is this the end for music as we know it?

We know that internet technology has disrupted the music industry, but could it disrupt music itself, or painting, or literature? Armand Leroi, professor of evolutionary development biology at Imperial College, London, believes music is already in the frame. He told Radio 4's Today programme today: "What we are trying to find out is whether you need a composer to make music … and we don't think you do."

The idea is that music can evolve: a computer programme randomly churns out two short loops of noise which, if judged pleasant by a human participant, are allowed to "breed" and recombine, mixing up the material to create four new loops, and so on. The surviving, thriving loops end up exhibiting some of our favourite musical traits: major chords, rhythms and so on.

Whether similar techniques could produce paintings or poems remains to be seen but art, especially non-representational art, is already facing an identity crisis. For some time it has been difficult to tell the difference between paintings created by apes and those made by humans, as websites which allow you to compare them – such as An Artist or an Ape (http://bit.ly/dwOgP) confirm. Now that computers are generating random shapes and colours it is becoming impossible to distinguish between human and machine-generated work.

This doesn't matter if you merely want something pleasant to look at, but it does raise the perennial problem "What is art?" in a more challenging form. Does it matter if art can't pass some kind of Turing test, in which human endeavour can be separated from chance? And who gets the credit – the creator of the software, the person who presses the button to produce myriad random patterns or the person who chooses one of those patterns as their art?

With some photo applications such as Instagram, which applies filters to pictures prior to them being shared on a social network, it can be difficult to know whether you are looking at a photo or a painting. Maybe it doesn't matter. The digital revolution enables almost anyone with an idea to become a creator of art. Who knows, in the future, people may decide they would prefer to have their own randomised art at home rather than the work of an established painter.

Sculptors are already using computer-generated three-dimensional photos to create their artwork and then getting someone else, maybe far away, to print them out on the new breed of 3D printers. If you think this is all pie in the sky – there is now an app for the iPhone, Sculpteo, enabling anyone to design their own sculptures from photographs on their mobile and have them printed out as fully formed objects on remote 3D printers. Being computer generated, it will be easy to create randomly shaped sculptures, thereby blurring traditional demarcation lines in sculpture.

Words have so far been immune to digital disruption despite there being only 26 letters of the alphabet to play around with compared with billions of colour combinations in a digital picture. This is because the output of language (words and sentences) is much more formalised than in other art forms and the maths of random generation is against you. More than 12 years ago I set up a website, www.shakespearesmonkey.co.uk, (it doesn't work well on all browsers) to see if a computer would randomly replicate two lines of poetry. A coder colleague at the Guardian, Noll Scott, predicted it would soon reach 12 or 13 correct letters (out of 48) and then take many years to progress. He was right. The programme is still running, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, but it hasn't improved on 13 correct letters at one go for over eight years.

There have been lots of randomly produced poems but few are remembered. As for a computer-written novel, that is strictly for the birds unless it just extracts material from existing texts – or if the Imperial College experiments in Darwinian music can be applied to sentences.Meanwhile, in judging what is art, we would do well to remember Julian Huxley's observation – paintings by apes are pleasing to look at, and the point is they don't pretend to symbolise anything.

Next Post: "Food for Thought on a Summer Sunday Morning (and Music, too!)", to be published on Sunday 1st September at 10am (GMT)