LO 10

“EMMY“
Composer: David Cope

“EMMY” is a program developed by David Cope, a classical composer with a deep interest in the role which computers and AI can play in music. His experiments in music intelligence allowed him to create EMMY, a program which can be fed examples of work from specific musicians and composers and in turn produce new pieces based on the characteristics of the music it studies. I find it fascinating that EMMY is able to break down and learn aspects of what makes a specific composer’s work unique and recreate it in a way that is not necessarily copying, but familiar and new. Moreover, Cope theorized that “what made a composer properly understandable, properly “affecting”, was in part the fact of mortality.” Interestingly, this led him to unplug EMMY in 2004, after it had produced over 11,000 pieces.