Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso
Spanish Cubist painter (1881 - 1973)The idea is that truly great music isn't music that takes an existing style and moves it. Great music is the music that creates something that isn't already there.
Why would a human, but not an AI, be able to do that?
John Cage's work was influenced by literature.
AI's cannot read literature?
Because AI operates according to structures that have been designed by human hands. The human mind is incomprehensibly more complex than any AI. So you could make AI that does innovate, but its innovations would still be far more predictable and routine than any that a human mind could come up with.
AI's cannot read literature?
John Cage would read Finnegans Wake, draw lines up and down pages, and derive poems from words formed by what his line would hit. A computer would never think to do that on its own. There's a fine line between genius and insanity, it is said - and computers can't be insane.
Not necessarily. Using evolutionary approach, AI can come up with innovations on par (and possibly even beyond) to what humans could do:
One implication seems to be that the human brain is itself not a computer.
Comparing us to computers is really ignoring most of the limitations of computers, and invites far to simplistic - and inaccurate - a comparison.
Is the human brain a machine? 71 hits for: http://blogsearch.google.com?q=%22brain+is+a+machine%22
8,400 hits for: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22brain+is+a+machine%22
That implication was not intended. The search links were intended as food for thought.
I think that "human as machine" has some interesting implications, but I think that by the time we make machines as complex and sophisticated as ourselves, they won't be machines any longer. If I see a machine that's organic and that has a superpowerful mind, I won't think it's a machine anymore.
Making of wetware was not intended to be implied.
If I see a machine that's organic
One of these?: http://images.google.com/images?q=flower Was that a Yes or a No?
Zappa you can't tell. In the last 3 months I've listened to all 60 of his albums because he never repeats himself, not even song to song. Even on Freak Out!, his debut, you can't guess from the first song just how incredible the third song will be, or that from there it will move to doo wop or kid's songs. He does it all. If you've heard that album, you can't tell what Absolutely Free or We're Only In It For The Money will do. After that he does a postmodern doo wop album and moves on to jazz fusion and movie tracks, returning to pop rock just in time to release an album consisting of only guitar solos.
With Zappa, if he's not singing you can't tell it's him writing the songs. He's the single most diverse composer I've ever heard.
I've just made an impromptu collection of Zappa songs - http://omegaseye.com/Zappa.zip. His rock songs never sound the same, his pop doesn't sound like anything else. The closest he ever gets to generic is Fountain of Love, which has a surprising guitar line, a very complex choral arrangement, and quotes from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the end. I could give you more songs from any of these albums, or show you other albums of his, and unless I told you you would be unable to guess it was Zappa.
You could analyze Please Please Me and determine how to generate similar Beatlesy sounds. You couldn't predict Help. If you had Help, you could make Help sounds but you couldn't figure out that Rubber Soul was on its way. The sonic style changed constantly and evolved incredibly.
Or imagine trying to copy Frank Zappa. You might replicate a single song, but it wouldn't be possible to predict the next songs in a given album. He evolved and shifted too rapidly to follow.