The pop stars of the future could be…computers! It would mean that expensively-marketed human singers and rappers such as Kanye West and Rihanna could be replaced by electronic machines that created music to order, according to the taste and mood of the listener.“You wouldn’t have to spend a lot of money downloading your favourite tracks!” says Dr Steven Jan, a University of Huddersfield music lecturer. “You just tell the computer that you want a piece of music to suit your mood or something like a piece that you heard last week and that you want it to be about three minutes long.”
Also working in the field at the University is Valerio Velardo, who claims that creative computers could have as big an impact in the field of music as digital cameras in photography.
Just as everybody can now become a competent photographer, future software could enable people to input musical ideas that would then be processed and developed by the computer.
Dr Jan and Valerio are co-editors of the new Journal of Creative Music Systems, which will be published online early in 2016, and contain articles from global experts.
The field of computational creativity is vibrant at the moment,” said Dr Jan. “There is work being done to develop programs that can paint and that can write poetry and stories and generate humour.
“But computational creativity in music hasn’t been particularly well explored so far,” he added, explaining why it had been decided to launch the new journal.
There is a crucial distinction between “computer music”, in which humans use electronic technology as a compositional tool, and music that is actually created by computers. Dr Jan believes that recent developments mean that computers are increasingly capable of creativity.
“Things that were thought impossible ten years ago are now becoming a reality,” he said, although he added that programs which have been developed so far mainly focus on quite low-level compositional tasks, with only a few systems yet capable of generating a complete, fully-rounded composition from scratch.
Italian-born Valerio Velardo – who has a background in both music and physics and is now studying for a doctorate at Huddersfield, a noted centre for contemporary music – has coined the term “anthropocentric” to describe music created by computers that can appeal to human listeners. In fact, some of this music is capable of passing the so-called “Turing Test” – meaning that it can be indistinguishable from music composed by a human musician.
The concept of “creativity as a service”, meaning people at home could create their own music on demand, could have considerable economic implications for the music industry, continued Dr Jan.
“Human beings will always gain pleasure playing music and listening to it performed by humans. But the need to have a Kanye West or a Rihanna, and the huge economic infrastructure that supports and markets such people, might be threatened and challenged.”
In addition to “anthropocentric” music created by computers, there is also the possible that they could develop of a musical language that humans are incapable of understanding or enjoying, but which could be appreciated by other machines.
