Fred Frith once told me that he often begins teaching music by taking musicians' instruments away from them. "Because the instrument is a powerful statement," he explained, "and it's a way in which you can impose yourself on other people. I think the first thing I want to do is get rid of that, and have people just react together as people, so they just have to deal with who they are."

[For context, the full interview can be read here: https://www.steveelkins.net/Interviews/Freedom-In-Fragments-An/]

This got me thinking: if one can come to a deeper understanding of what music is by taking musical instruments away, by confronting how we relate to ourselves and the people around us without any props to hide behind, then does something remain, in the absence of instruments, that we might still call music? Do the active ingredients that remain alive in us long after musical sounds have died give us some clue as to why we perceive making and listening to music as meaningful, or even sacred? What are those ingredients? Does the music transmit them, or awaken something that is already inside us?

I don't think these are academic questions. I think they are a good starting point for asking "why do we make music?" In 2003, I spent two months driving across the United States to interview musicians who I felt were addressing this question from very different angles. One of my most memorable encounters was with Pauline Oliveros in New York, whose recent keynote address at the 1999 Improvisation Across Borders conference in San Diego considered the extent to which machines were capable of what traditionally defines the human musician. Pauline reflected on Ray Kurzweil, whose pioneering work has spanned invention of musical instruments, artificial intelligence, and a position as director of engineering at Google. In his 1998 book "The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence" Kurzweil speculated that "In a hundred years there may be no clear distinction between humans and computers. There will be enormous augmentation of human perceptual and cognitive abilities through neural implant technology. Humans who do not use such implants are unable to participate in meaningful dialogue with those who do." Kurzweil also predicted that by 2009, "human musicians [will] routinely jam with cybernetic musicians."

Pauline remarked that "many musicians are already improvising with machines programmed to respond to improvised input." In fact, several of the musicians I had been filming between 2002 and 2009 for my feature documentary "The Reach Of Resonance" had been doing this in various ways for quite some time. George Lewis (husband of one of the featured artists in my film, pictured right), had drawn from a lifetime of experience performing with master improvisers, including Count Basie and the AACM, to develop software in the mid-1980s that "listens" and responds to improvising musicians in real time. By 2009, he was using it to improvise with musical robots created by NIME (New Interfaces For Musical Expression).

Pauline described Experiments in Musical Intelligence by her friend David Cope, which allegedly demonstrates that all known styles of musical composition can be programmed and contained on a computer chip: "This system makes it possible to generate new compositions in the styles of various composers, from Bach and Mozart to Prokofiev and Scott Joplin. The program SARA (Simple Analytic Recombinant Algorithm) produces new compositions in the style of the music in its database. Already audiences are hard put to tell what music is composed by a human and what is composed by a machine."

"It's already evident that computers and human intelligence are merging," Pauline observed. "Humans with the aid of technology already see and hear far beyond the capability of the unaided senses...what would I want on a musician chip if I were to receive the benefit of neural implant technology? What kind of a 21st Century musician could I be...What could be enhanced...What could be heard...What and how would such powers be measured and valued and by whom?" "We must decide," Pauline continued, "what a 50 year old structure of silicon is going to tell a five billion year old structure of carbon...We need to know what constitutes a musician."

Before returning to Pauline's question about what she would want on her musician chip, it is worth pausing to better understand David Cope's Experiments in Musical Intelligence. In February 2009, I drove to Santa Cruz, California to ask him how he was enabling computers to create new music by dead composers. The following is an excerpt from our recorded conversation.

STEVE ELKINS: Your work has deeply challenged conventional understandings of what human creativity is by holding it up to the mirror of technology as it has developed over many decades. So has Pauline Oliveros. Has your work ever overlapped?

DAVID COPE: In 1982, I began an effort to build a specialized radio telescope at Walker Pass in the southern Sierra Mountains, that we could use as a musical instrument by taking radio waves, and hearing patterns in the data that you wouldn't normally be able to decipher visually, then transforming them into music. Pauline had an idea for projecting one of her pieces as radar off the moon. Somehow the sounds were altered on the moon's surface by the irregularities of the terrain, the mountains or the craters, as they move the radar across the surface to get that effect. She came out to talk to me about these kinds of possibilities.

ELKINS: Who else was interested in using your telescope?

COPE: Frank Drake, who was the head of the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico [pictured above]. He is very well known for his association with Carl Sagan, who was of course very involved with radio astronomy and particularly the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Arthur C. Clarke, author of "2001: A Space Odyssey" corresponded with me about it. Isaac Asimov...

ELKINS: You obviously peaked the interest of huge names in both science and science fiction.

COPE: Even Robert Heinlein used to live right up the hill here. I wouldn't place myself in that ilk, but I'm fascinated by all of their ideas.

ELKINS: How did you begin investigating whether computers can be musically creative?

COPE: In the mid-70s, I began trying to figure out how to define my own musical style of composing in ways that you could actually code. I began writing a piece algorithmically on old IBM computer punchcards. I assumed it would be so bad that it would cure my writer's block at the time. I thought that by having a computer so poorly replicate my own creativity, it would become a provocateur that would make me think, "I wouldn't do that, I'd do this instead." But of course, how do you begin to define what your own style is? And even if I could, I wasn't sure that I wanted to do it either, because if you know what you're doing then you start questioning it each time it comes about: "Am I being too repetitious? Am I writing the same piece over and over again?"

So I decided to work on finding ways to code someone else's style, and began working on Bach instead. I built a program that analyzed a database of Bach chorales, and spit out music that was in the style of the music in the database, but without actually duplicating any of the pieces in the database. Before I mothballed my program EIMI (Experiments In Musical Intelligence), there were approximately one thousand pieces that "she" had composed. They are now published and available on the internet. They range anywhere from full-scale grand operas to small inventions for piano. Large scale symphonies, for example Beethoven's 10th Symphony, and Mozart's supposedly 42nd Symphony down to a solo cello suite movement in the style of Bach. Hundreds of hours of music when performed. There's also 10,000 other pieces, including 5,000 Bach chorales available on my internet site. I've only heard two, but other people talk about the other ones.

In most cases, I did not produce any more of a composer's type of work than the composer him or herself did. So there are 56 Chopin mazurkas. There are 48 preludes and 48 fugues. I didn't go one over to try to make a point. But with the Bach chorales I did. And they've been received very well by listeners. There are 36 composers in all that have been done, and they range from contemporary composers such as myself, back to 16th century palestrina, Bach, a couple of his sons, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Lizst, Hayden, Shoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky, Bartok, Brahms, I could go on and on. When I started doing this in the 80s, I had to program five numbers for each note that went into the database, so it took me months to write one database. So I was really serious about this.

COPE (cntd): I soon discovered that this really bothered people. You could say, "how is the planet going to be any worse off for having more music that sounds like Bach in it," but this pissed off people something terrible! Even close friends.

I think I've grappled with what their problem is: people think that creativity is one of the few things that human beings can truly still hold on to and call their own. They either want to find the stuff produced by machine to be awful, or if they find it good, then they're really going to have problems.

This came to the fore in a review of a particular concert I did here in Santa Cruz, where we performed a piece by a composer, and then a piece by my program in the style of the composer side by side. Hearing about that, a reviewer wrote a review of the concert two weeks before the concert actually occurred. He made no bones about the fact that he wasn't going to attend the concert, even though I called and asked him to, and gave him free tickets. He was obsessed with the whole notion of what I was doing, that somehow my program was going to dilute the whole world of creativity in a way that eventually no one would care what the original Mozart music was. There were going to be all these computer created copies out there, and at some point no one would even remember or care who this Mozart fellow was. When people have these concerns about creativity that a program has, I'm often remiss in telling them that in fact, to write a good program is very creative.

On the other extreme, I had a concert of pieces by my program Emily Howell, which composes from a database of all the composers in my EIMI program at once, ranging from 16th century Palestrina to Scott Joplin. As an experiment, we didn't tell the audience this time that the piece was composed by a computer, to see if their reaction would be different. The concert was a total hit. Audience members told me how heartrending and beautiful the music was, and wanted to know where they could find out more about the composer. Months later, I gave a lecture. One of the people who reacted that way to my concert got to learn about how the piece was composed and listen to the music again. He came up to me afterward and told me that the process was interesting but that he could tell the music was composed by a computer because it had no heart or soul in it. I wanted so badly to say to him, "you know, that's the same piece you heard four months ago that you said was SO meaningful to you. And the only thing that's changed is that now you know the context." And that story says it all. This really intrigued me, so I thought I'd do more of it.

COPE (cntd): I'm in no way trying to denigrate that individual. He represents how most people feel about what I do. Friends started calling me "Tin Man," which as you recall from the Wizard of Oz, was the mechanical character in search of a heart. I could tell you stories for hours on end of the absolutely intolerant reactions people have had to what I've been doing, and the output of my program throughout the entire spectrum. At times, it has literally reached the point of evoking physical aggression out of people. Douglas Hofstadter, long known for his Pulitzer Prize winning book "Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" and his pioneering work with artificial intelligence, toured around for many years giving demonstrations of my program to people, playing computer-composed Bach for example. And once in Toronto, an audience member came up to him and told him that he thought the computer composed Bach was much better than the original. And this infuriated Doug.

ELKINS: If I recall, one of the reasons Doug doesn't believe computers can be creative is that consciousness is a prerequisite for creativity. Why is it that you don't believe this is the case?

COPE: Creating music is essentially composing algorithms, whether you're a conscious human or an unconscious computer program. An algorithm is a word that seems fancy as it has come back into play with computers, but it's actually an ancient combination of words that's been with us for a long time. An algorithm is essentially a list of things to do to achieve some result. A good example is a recipe for a cake. Or a grocery list. In our daily lives, we use algorithms to add and subtract, such as 2 + 2 = 4, all the way up to different types of integral and differential calculus. Many basic functions of our body such as our beating hearts, our breathing, our blinking eyes, are tasks that have been relegated to algorithms in the brain. One of the most interesting algorithms is DNA, which helps make us the way we are.

So algorithms are an inherent part of life, as well as computer science. One could almost suggest that everything we do are algorithms. And the things that we think we're doing non-algorithmically are unconscious or subconscious algorithms. Composers are usually trying to take the algorithms they're consciously or subconsciously hearing in their environment, and their DNA, and include their personality as part of the process. It really gives weight to the notion that "you are what you hear."

Also, I've discovered through my work that there are ways for computers to act creatively. Not intelligently, but creatively. After all, what is intelligence? I looked up intelligence in Webster's Dictionary once, and it said: "The ability to reason." Well, I wanted to make sure I really understood this definition, so I looked up "reason." And the definition for reason was: "The capacity for intelligence." So how far have we come? We talk about AI, but we don't even know what I is. I have real trouble with the notion of "artificial intelligence." It takes life to have intelligence. Because you have to be in a situation where you can risk and potentially lose something before you can gain something, in order to develop intelligence. And computer programs don't have a concept of losing something.

But computers can be creative just like human beings, and in a way that people are emotionally, or even spiritually, moved by. In 2006, I proposed a relatively new form of interaction between a user and the program in which the program attempts to please the user by composing music it believes the user will enjoy. And it is the way composers work in the future. I don't say that with arrogance or conjecture, I just really believe that this is the direction things are going to go.

ELKINS: Why do you think Douglas Hofstadter believes consciousness is necessary for creativity?

COPE: Well, I think Doug has a romanticized understanding of what music is. An understanding I certainly would have agreed with through many years of my young life. I had this notion that composers were kind of talking to me through their music. And that I was receiving their communication, which was telling me things emotionally that could not be expressed in language. But as I grew as a composer, I realized that this wasn't true. That the wonderment of music is not that it means something, but that it means nothing. Or, put another way, that it means something different to every person who listens. The music itself isn't "saying" anything. It's hard enough to get a one-to-one meaning out of language, even if you're not using it as poetry where we try to fuzzy language up a bit and get multiple meanings out of it. And if you keep moving in that direction, at a certain point poetry eventually becomes just sound to the point where it has no more meaning, and to me that's music.

I think Doug believes that if you know enough about a composer's life, and enough about the other works of that composer, then you have a special relationship with that composer, even though one of the two parties is dead. That there's a real communication flowing from the consciousness of the composer, because he, as a listener, has received it. I'm very sympathetic to this idea, but I just don't agree. I think it's me that's sending the message to me. The music is only provoking it. Music means something different to each listener. And I think that's something we should be enthusiastic about. After all, we all see the world differently, and that's what art is all about.

ELKINS: Then what aspects of creativity are uniquely human, that computers can't do?

COPE: Computers don't initiate themselves. They're creative when we instigate them to be creative. Human beings somehow do it on their own. And this encapsulation in a single unit of being not only able to react to one's environment, but to become internally excited about an idea that may occur to them to the extent that they will actually attempt work on that project and complete it, is something that computers can't do. I suppose that's very akin to Hofstadter's view of consciousness. Computers can do everything else humans can do faster, more economically, and more correctly than humans can do. But what they really can't do is have a self-awareness. They don't do something that no one has asked them to do, from sheer desire of wanting to do it. I can't program that into a computer. I think it's going to be very hard to get that aspect of programming into software. We would have to gift that computer program with something we ourselves may never truly understand. And how do you program that?

Arthur C. Clarke In Sri Lanka

ELKINS: Do you believe that human and computer intelligence will merge and lead to transhumans, like Kurzweill's concept of the technological singularity?

COPE: Kurzweill writes about my work occassionally. I haven't read it. A lot of people assume I'm a futurist like him. To come back to Arthur C. Clarke, he had a different view, which was fueled by a book he wrote early in his career called "Childhood's End," which was the inspiration for the cover art of Led Zeppelin's "Houses of the Holy": that technology will play absolutely no role in our future whatsoever. That it's an aberration. His view is that the most valuable thing that we bring to the planet is our conscious mind. And that we are slowly but surely going to flee our bodies and become separate from the atomic world that we live in, becoming the intervals between those atomic structures. We could then transport ourselves various places simultaneously and be everywhere at once if you wish, although there will be no more distinct "ourselves" anymore. In other words, he thinks that our human-ness is going to survive us, no matter what toys we play with at present. Childhood's end, in that book, meant that all these things which are still considered metaphysical, and therefore pseudo-science, some of them are real and they will become what is our future.

The opposite is this notion that technology is exactly where we're going. In fact, we're not only going there, we're turning into it. And that brings us to cybernetics. An android is a machine with some living parts tucked in around the corners. But a cybernetic being is the reverse of that: a living being with lots of mechanical things planted in it to make it continue to live. We already have cybernetic people walking around right now with artificial hearts and lungs and artificial kidneys. It's just a matter of time before more than half of us is going to be that way. And we all know there's going to be an internet in our bodies someday. I don't see any reason why in the distant future we couldn't transfer our brain to a hard disk of some sort, or atomic memory, or nanotechnology at some small level, and transfer ourselves into these new bodies.

COPE (cntd): Most people who look at my work would think that I believe we're headed in the direction of becoming technology. But I'm actually with Arthur C. Clarke. I truly believe that as time goes on, we're not going to forget our human-ness. When artificial intelligence began to get all its hype in the 80s, it was essentially based on the idea that we all understood what intelligence was. And now we know that nobody has a clue. Now AI is really beginning to look at the human brain to figure out how it works. And I think that as we do that, it's going to become more and more possible to think about things in terms of the kind of metaphysics we thought about in the past. We know that some people are more empathic than others. Who knows how far we can take it. So in terms of the long distance future, I tend to think about humans without bodies. We might still have machines around, but they'll still just be tools.

ELKINS: Do you think computers will be capable of this type of empathy? Is there an algorithm for that?

COPE: There has been, and still is, this false notion that computers can somehow be more than complicated shovels. That there's something going on in there, this fabled ghost in the machine bull. Computers have always been, to me, just tools. Because I've worked inside them, and I know enough about the hardware to know that there's really nothing going on in there besides addition and subtraction, fundamentally. The basic hardware isn't even capable of multiplication and division. That comes at a software level above the ones and zeros that run the machine. What goes on in there is what's programmed to go on in there. And it's been programmed by human beings. So this notion of computers having unique personality or a consciousness, or self-identity, makes people think that the computers are going to somehow compete with us, or become our opponents. They think that if computers can send men and women into outer space and create moving music in the styles of our most revered composers, then what's left?

ELKINS: Did Pauline Oliveros ever tell you what she would want on her musician chip if she were to receive the benefit of neural implant technology?

[My interview with Pauline Oliveros about how her life's work has led to a unique and moving answer to this question, will be posted soon.]