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Comment On “The Computer As The Artist’s Alter Ego”

It is my pleasure to comment on Otto Laske's paper (Leonardo 23, No. 1, 53-66, 1990). I had the opportunity to read several published papers and preprints by Laske when preparing a one-day discussion on composition theory, which he recently was invited to chair at the Laboratoire Musique et Infonnatique de Marseille (MIM). As a computer scientist, I have been involved in research work with ethnomusicologists and contemporary musicians for a number of years [1]. Both the analysis of improvisational schemata of North Indian tabla players and the work with contemporary musicians have convinced me that looking at 'frozen' data (scores) yields a very narrow understanding of musical systems. People (including musicians) who use computers are often stuck with the belief that the world beyond computer representations is very weakly related to the topic they are investigating. Taking just the opposite view, the romantic attitude stipulates that music (hence music making), like any 'high-level' human activity, cannot be captured in formal descriptions. Indeed, computer tools and methods available so far are still in infancy; but to ignore their potential role would be the denial of a positivist attitude toward progress, which I believe has always been a characteristic of art music (be it in Western Europe or, say, in seventeenth-century Muslim India). A scientific attitude consists of trying to delineate musical reality as a whole [2] and then only making it clear which aspects of that reality are left out when it is reduced to formal descriptions — eventually, which formal aspects cannot be imbedded in (operative) computer implementations. Epistemologists are concerned with the question of why we should at all need computers. The author makes it clear in the first paragraph that computers are useful in enabling artists "to distance themselves from conventional approaches". The statement is a counterpoint of the prevailing opinion that computers are no more than reliable storehouses of past experiences, to the extent that a memory-based paradigm of creativity is often put forward. As Stephen Smoliar observes, 'What Laske has overlooked is that the actual behaviour of making music cannot be abstracted away from the behaviour of listening to music and recalling what one has heard ... Ultimately, music is made so that one may listen to it .... The truth is that all the mind can do with music is compare it to past experiences" [31.