mmiller5-Looking Outwards-11

Computer generated chorale based off Bach’s compositions

This week, I’ll be looking at a Bach Style Chorale created by the program EMI (or Emmy, I dunno) and David Cope.  EMI, or Experiments in Musical Intelligence, is a program made by David Cope in 1981 that composes music in the styles of various composers, essentially making pieces that sound as though they were written by those composers.  Abstractly, the program works in three steps: deconstruction–analyzing pieces of the selected works–, signatures–identifying common aspects of works–, and compatibility– recombining these parts into new pieces.  I find this to be very inspiring because its goal is to computationally analyze musical structure and then produce something from that, potentially creating limitless numbers of works that follow existing styles.  This method could be utilized by composers to analyze their own works to aid their composing process, allowing man and machine to work together to make works of art.