Composers aren't born composers either. Through years of practice an individual learns how to manipulate the instrument and over this time period, listens to/plays a wide variety of well known musical compositions. Only then is the individual able to use his knowledge to create something new. It would be similar to loading the program with most compositions from a particular time period, and then having something produced which both sounds different enough to be distinguishable, but similar enough to be pleasant.

Yes, that is true, they are not born composers. But their art is not to take a piece of music that already exists and then transform it according to a set of rules, that is where the 'art', 'inspiration' and 'transpiration' comes in, and it takes a being capable of emotion to be able to do that.

You are seriously underestimating what composing is, it is not merely 'coming up with sounds that are distinguishable and pleasant'. That's the mechanical end of the business, any piece of software that you teach about basic key signatures and tempo rules & phrasing could in theory do that.

Composing is much like story telling, to paint a picture in sound that evokes an emotion with a purpose in the listener.

On the day a computer comes up with something that moves me as strongly as Bach or Vivaldi I'll eat my hat, but I won't be holding my breath for that.

To me, that sounds like saying "and then some magic happens" which ultimately creates the end work. Who is to say that the intermediate steps could or could not be reproduced by a program?

By the way, I'm a painter, so I'm not saying that when I do create a work that it was crafted by a set of logical, binary steps that I always follow for each painting. But I can say that my work can be analyzed to see why I did every single step, and none of those are impossible to express to a computer. Aside from my anecdotal experience, this is something that is also easily observable within the visual arts, and the artists that are recognized for defining the field.

I think that in the end it all boils down to motivation and free will, a computer has none, even the ones with random generators.

An intelligent being (artificial or 'natural' makes no difference here) has free will and I believe (but can not prove) that eventually that leads to intelligence.

The prevailing belief here (certainly judging by the moderation ;) ) seems to be that you can algorithmically describe everything. I'm not sure that that is possible, neither am I sure that it is not.

But to date, nobody has designed a machine that on its own decide to go and do anything at all. Even the act of deciding to make a painting vs going out for lunch or talking to someone for an hour or two requires free will and intelligence. No computer in existence today can do that, and if there is not going to be some fundamental change in how computers work I doubt that one will do so in the future.

If you haven't read it yet look at the top of this discussion, rms has posted a link that makes for some very interesting reading on all this.

& thanks for the exchange, it has been educational, especially about the 'method' that could be abstracted from art.

Yes, I understand absolutely where you are coming from here. I simply am not sure whether there exists something inherently different that allows me to make decisions such as eating lunch vs. creating a painting, or whether it's just a matter of complexity within my own memory, (such as my past experience of painting at noon on a sunny sunday has rewarded me with a good painting, which to me is similar to expressing that idea to a program). But again, this is merely philosophical. I just don't want to throw that idea out simply because we haven't done it yet.

And it's been a pleasant exchange on my end as well :)

"But to date, nobody has designed a machine that on its own decide to go and do anything at all."

That's simply not true. For example the Google bot decides every seconds if it wants to crawl this website or another one. I don't think you are up to date - might want to read up on "autonomous robotics". Many of the algorithms are so in nature that humans can not predict their results.

I think if you talk to robot builders they will tell you that the robots do stuff they weren't told to do all the time.

As for motivation, I don't think it is as magical as you presume it to be. We are not motivated to do arbitrary things - nature has motivated us to do certain things (think, learn, reproduce). So if we motivate a computer to do certain things (like crawl web site), why should it not count?

Whether we have the mental capability to simulate any amount of computer time does not mean that the algorithms are not deterministic in nature and that they could be simulated and computed by any turing capable machine, including the human brain. It might take a while, but that's the only difference.

Anyway, I can see I am not going to be able to convince you of this and it is getting late so I cede to you.

But thank you for the interesting exchange.

So music isn't music unless it's Mozart?

I don't think it's me who is misunderstanding the discussion here. You're using double standards.

When a primal tribe is beating on drums: music. When a computer builds a primitive melody? That's not music! Those are just bits and bytes!

If I follow your logic to the extreme a computer can never compose music because there will always be a human who built the computer, or built the computer that built the computer that composed the music. I don't buy that.

I'm not saying a computer can not compose music, I'm saying that without real intelligence there is no composition, merely the following of a set of rules, a program. Intelligence, artificial or not, is capable of such stuff, a mechanical device interpreting fixed rules is not.

When a primal tribe beats on a drum they've just invented music. When a computer beats on a drum it has been told by some human to beat a drum.

"When a computer beats on a drum it has been told by some human to beat a drum."

Well yeah, it seems likely that if a computer ever becomes really intelligent, it has been built by a human. So?

If it is an intelligent computer it will not need to be told what to do, it will motivate itself, but we may not even recognize its actions as motivation because the concepts are not clarified, we only know what motivates us, we can not begin to imagine how a sentient AI would be motivated, maybe it will tell us, maybe it won't, who know... That motivation does not necessarily have anything in common with a human motivation, there are plenty of alternatives. It might not want to beat a drum, even when told to.

For that to happen though we have a bunch of formidable hurdles to cross, and in spite of all our processing power and data storage capability we have not yet been able to simulate the intelligence of even an insect or a small mammal.

Whether an AI is built by humans or aliens or comes in to being through some freak coincidence is irrelevant.

As long as it takes a human with their intelligence to tell a computer what to do it has not achieved intelligence, merely the capability to follow instructions very precisely.

Are these human composers not "merely following a set of rules", namely quantum mechanics?

You're in line with Roger Penrose here, who suggests that in order to generate consciousness we will have to look at quantum effects rather than at molecular level effects.

This is possible, but not a certainty.

From what I understand, molecular level effects are the same as quantum effects looked at from a slightly higher level. My point was that, as far as we can tell, everything people do is the ultimate result of applying a fairly simple set of rules (the physical laws).

I don't think it is quite that simple. Quantum effects can screw up the apparent 'rules' of the macro world (atoms, molecules and upwards) subtle the closer you get to the lower levels of the macro world.

Physics as you know it ('classical physics') stops making sense at that level, things no longer have an apparent causal relationship.

What Roger Penrose argues in his book 'the emperors new mind' is that 'mind' springs from these effects.

He suspects that if we simply follow the classical physics rules that we will end up on a dead end and that it will take a full blown quantum simulation of a whole brain in order to simulate one with the emergent behaviour that is being sought.

Certainly. Setting aside whether or not quantum (instead of classical) physics is necessary, it certainly seems to be sufficient to explain everything that a person does. Given that, how can a person not be considered to "merely follow a set of rules"?