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2 results

  • 9 - Digital Voices: Posthumanism and the Generation of Empathy

  • Edited by Nicholas Cook, University of Cambridge, Monique M. Ingalls, Baylor University, Texas, David Trippett, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Companion to Music in Digital Culture
    Published online:
    30 August 2019
    Print publication:
    19 September 2019, pp 227-248

  • Summary

    This chapter investigates digital technologies that variously assist, enable or simulate musical praxis. The first section sets up an opposition between the idea of the digital tool that augments human agency, and the machinic automatism predicated on the idea that reality is fundamentally number (dataism) and ticks along without the need for human consciousness. This gives rise to the idea that mechanical automatism is also intrinsic to human agency, a strand of posthuman thought on which the rest of the chapter turns. Accordingly, the second section shows how posing algorithmic composition as an expression of the posthuman is problematic. The final section focuses on the synthetic voices of digital assistants from online service providers that generate empathy at the price of a surrogate ‘conscience’. Accommodating this within a humanistic model is possible, but a closing case study of Tod Machover’s futurist opera, Death and the Powers (2010), raises the prospect of what might be called a ‘dark ontology’ of the digital.

  • Automatic music composition using answer set programming

  • GEORG BOENN, MARTIN BRAIN, MARINA DE VOS, JOHN FFITCH
  • Journal:
    Theory and Practice of Logic Programming / Volume 11 / Issue 2-3 / March 2011
    Published online by Cambridge University Press:
    22 February 2011, pp. 397-427

  • Music composition used to be a pen and paper activity. These days music is often composed with the aid of computer software, even to the point where the computer composes parts of the score autonomously. The composition of most styles of music is governed by rules. We show that by approaching the automation, analysis and verification of composition as a knowledge representation task and formalising these rules in a suitable logical language, powerful and expressive intelligent composition tools can be easily built. This application paper describes the use of answer set programming to construct an automated system, named Anton, that can compose melodic, harmonic and rhythmic music, diagnose errors in human compositions and serve as a computer-aided composition tool. The combination of harmonic, rhythmic and melodic composition in a single framework makes Anton unique in the growing area of algorithmic composition. With near real-time composition, Anton reaches the point where it can not only be used as a component in an interactive composition tool but also has the potential for live performances and concerts or automatically generated background music in a variety of applications. With the use of a fully declarative language and an “off-the-shelf” reasoning engine, Anton provides the human composer a tool which is significantly simpler, more compact and more versatile than other existing systems.