Interesting thread. Not much to add, but a few comments:
EgAD wrote:I wasn't talking about protecting anything
Don't blame the ones who think you are talking about that, though. You make it sound like you are very much trying to protect non-generative music, and see generative music as non-art.
As you say things like, "envisioning that kind of future is envisioning a future where we take the art out of music", and "it's wonderful for a game to be musical but music is not a game", you give an impression you're not recognizing the art in defining new rulesets, setting up causal relationships, deciding what is being generated and how -- i.e. programming and setting up the underlying construct which results in the actual music.
In other words, you don't think coding can be art. I think it can be just that. Defining a generative music system (no matter whether it's done using relatively low-level programming languages or specialized environments allowing you to define sufficient logical rules to describe music) is a way to express artistic, musical ideas through programming.
You say "computers can make music, programs can make music, just don't tell me that you made it" -- but how can a program make music without the musical aspects being sufficiently designed? That designing act, leading to the final structure of the resulting music,
is the art. Only the methods of arriving at the musical output are different, but nevertheless, there is an artist at work.
You say the musical "style is is up to the computer therefore anybodys guess", but again, it's not going to be guesswork for the one who designed the system. You don't run a generative environment and suddenly get a completely different genre out of it, based on the whims of the computer. If that
seems to be the case, rest assured it's part of the original design as well. [Of course, at some point people will be dealing with artificial intelligences learning to do major spontaneous extrapolation like that, but that's not what we're dealing with generative music now, is it
]
"Music is not a game" is a topic worth of a discussion of its own, but I just have to say, in my opinion music as an artform is exceptionally open to abstract games. People have been playing and "playing" music for centuries, sometimes basing their work on devising different rulesets and indeed gamelike constructs. Both designing these kinds of underlying rules and applying them successfully are creative acts themselves.
Elaborate rules have been tested and put to good use, and subsequently broken to make way to new ones. Historically music has often been
manually generated using these constructs, of course making logical and aesthetic decisions creatively along the way, shaping the final form of the work. Think of a fugue (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugue), for example.
In short, reading these comments about generative music, I know exactly what dj superflat is getting at when he says, "this has been the silly rallying cry of the old guard for ages". EgAD, even though you say nobody made an argument about musical validity, you seem to make a strong argument about
artistic validity in general. No matter whether we're talking about the literary arts, the visual arts or music, that's indeed the perpetual rallying cry of the old guard: not recognizing a new structure, a new kind of approach, a new
movement, as art -- in the fear that it will ultimately devalue something old.
, you must be one of the kids from that musical apacolypes that eno was envisioning, you actualy believe it's old fashioned to play music. haha. ok i'm done, I think this is the perfect place to end my contribution to the discussion.from now on I'll just refer back to your post, and please don't edit any of your post, it's all just too good and explains my point far to well.
