Sofia Syjuco – Looking Outwards-04

Bach Style Chorale
David Cope
2012

A project that particularly interested me was David Cope’s EMI program, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence. I really admire Cope’s relationship to the project, how he treats it not as a way to exploit loopholes in human expectations of music, or something purely technical, but a natural progression of how we continue to understand composing music. I admire this because, I think too often that new media arts have a controversy surrounding them, and people ask questions like – is this even real art anymore? Can this still count as being creative if the computer does it for you? I personally think that these questions are ridiculous, and really admire how David Cope’s artistic sensibilities and thoughts on this subject manifest in the final form – something that generates music based on data, but ultimately contains mistakes or problems which humanize it in some way, blurring the line between what we consider a pristine and soulless work made by a machine, or a piece of music, perhaps not all too skillfully made but still interesting, created by something affectionately nicknamed “Emmy”.