Artificial Intelligence (Monday January 28, 1980) 11:17
Artificial Intelligence (Friday January 25, 1980) 10:45
The World After April (Tuesday January 22, 1980) 22:48
“Computer Experiments” is an interesting and beautiful-sounding experiment in software-generated music, created at a time when interest in and hopes for artificial intelligence were at a high point (for example, at the time, Douglas Hofstadter’s well-known book on this topic “Gödel, Escher, Bach” had just been published).
Three times during January 1980, Larry Fast set up the “ground-rules” for a self-composing program called Pink Tunes and let it execute on a digital computer to produce a “score” of voltage settings for an analogue Prophet 5 synthesiser to convert into sounds. The program does this by letting loose so-called stochastic (or random) processes on the set of notes, harmonies etc. specified beforehand (i.e. the ground-rules) so that the end-result is more or less unpredictable. All this of course begs the question whose music this actually is. Is it by Larry Fast, who sets up the rules ? Or by the Pink Tunes software, which employs the rules ? Or perhaps even by the software developer, who created the randomness settings ? Or a combination of the three (sort of “ghost in the machine” idea) ?
Anyway, the resulting pieces (quite similar to each other) are strangely beautiful in an abstract sort of way and have a smooth nature with plenty of long notes. Although the atmosphere is slightly abstract, it can also be relaxing so don’t think this is the sort of avant-garde electronic music with those impossible bleepy rhythms. With the strange man-made ambient music around today and even then, if you didn’t know this music was software-generated, you wouldn’t be able to infer that fact from hearing this album, so I suppose it passes what could be called the “musical Turing Test”.
Hence for those who appreciate experimental music, these three pieces are all well-constructed examples of this genre.
But the question remains: “Constructed by whom ? Or what ?”.
