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.