JAD ABUMRAD: This is Radiolab. I’m Jad Amumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Today, our program is about music. We ended our last segment with a look back at a very famous riot in 1913, and a composer, Igor Stravinsky, whose primary objective was to create something new and dissonant and disturbing. Right now, we'll present ...

ROBERT: The opposite.

JAD: The opposite.

ROBERT: The un-Stravinsky. [laughs]

JAD: The anti-Stravinsky, in a way. What we mean is we're gonna introduce you to a guy who has invented a new radically innovative and ingenious way of creating something old.

ELLEN HORNE: Hey there.

DAVID COPE: Are you Ellen?

ELLEN: I am. Are you David?

DAVID COPE: Hi, I'm David.

ELLEN: Nice to meet you.

JAD: His name is David Cope, he works and teaches composition at UC-Santa Cruz in California. And recently, our producer Ellen Horne was in the area, and it is a beautiful area.

DAVID COPE: It—it's 22.5 miles.

ELLEN: Wow.

JAD: And she paid him a visit.

DAVID COPE: It's extraordinary. And they like birds. We've got a—you know, I have nests in each window each year.

ELLEN HORNE: Do you really?

DAVID COPE: Sure. And this one’s over here, you can take a look if you like. [whistles] Come back in, it's okay, it’s just me. Come one, get back in your nest. She’s usually—she'll just hop right back in when she hears me talk. Aren't you gonna listen to me? [whistles]

JAD: All this was beside the point, because we had actually come to talk to David Cope not about nature, but actually about something unnatural that he'd done, which started about 20 years ago.

DAVID COPE: In 1980, I had a commission for an opera which involved actual money which had been given up front, and which, by the way, since I had four small children I had already spent. And for the first time in my life I suffered a composer's block. It was like somebody just shot me. I mean, here I should be at the heights of my creative power, and I can't find a reason to compose a first note. C sharp sounded no more interesting than C natural or a D. And the notes just didn't make any sense to me. I was really lost. I can't think of anything worse, because it's not my profession, it's what I am.

JAD: A short time later, David Cope is at a party, and he finds himself talking to a guy who programs computers.

DAVID COPE: And he was asking me how things were going, and I just simply said, "You know, it's a nightmare." And we talked through it, you know? And I—I think I must have initiated it by saying, "Are there any intelligent programs out there that I could possibly use to help me through this?" And he said, "Well, there aren’t any intelligent programs, period." But he said, "You don’t really need one. Don't you really need some kind of a foil?" He called it that. And I really had an epiphany. What I would do is build not so much a composing engine, but an analytical engine.

JAD: A computer. It took him years to build.

ELLEN: And that's it? This is ...

DAVID COPE: This is—this is EMI right here.

JAD: EMI is the computer’s name. It's spelled EMI.

DAVID COPE: EMI is an acronym for Experiments in Musical Intelligence.

JAD: And what he built EMI to do is analyze things—specifically notes. Treat notes like data. In other words he’ll feed EMI a bunch of sheet music.

DAVID COPE: For example, Bach Chorales.

JAD: EMI will then convert every single note on the page into numbers.

ELLEN: Wow, can you describe what you see on the screen?

DAVID COPE: Well, there are thousands and thousands of numbers, there are five numbers for each note.

JAD: Numbers which represent all kinds of things.

DAVID COPE: The on time, the pitch, the duration.

JAD: The chorale becomes a huge mass of information which EMI then sorts through looking for patterns. Hmmm, note 450 always seems to be followed by note 456, loud and then soft. She will find the patterns, every composer has them, the little things they do.

DAVID COPE: The DNA of the individual.

JAD: Now finding all the patterns, mapping the creative DNA of a composer, is in and of itself not all that interesting, it's what happens next which is the spooky part. Cope hits a few buttons and all the DNA starts to recombine. Ghosts stir in the machine. EMI Mahler. EMI Beethoven. Even Scott Joplin. And of course, his favorite, Bach.

DAVID COPE: Of course, then I became very excited about this prospect and immediately put in some Cope. And sure enough, my opera which had taken, I don't know, by the time I was—I had put in the Cope it was maybe five years had passed, the opera was written in about 10 days. So as a demonstration I'm going to play for you the opening of a chorale that was composed in 1987 in the style of Bach, one of the first ones that came out of the program. Now this chorale was so bad, it sounded to me when I first heard it that I—I threw it away. I put it in the trash can. And then I said, "Well, there's something about that that I kind of like," and I pulled it out again. And thank God I did because it's my—one of my favorite pieces the program ever produced.

DAVID COPE: So here's what it sounds like as the machine would play it.

[piano plays]

DAVID COPE: You can hear the rigidity of the performance, the machine-like rigor of the meter being processed and all the notes being processed at precisely the right time, with these timbres, these sonorities which are egregious. I mean, they’re just terrible. Now I'm going to play for you the same chorale as performed by a group of singers a while later.

[choir singing]

DAVID COPE: Same piece of music, incredibly human personal musical going someplace intriguing. I want to hear more of the second one. I'm glad I turned off the first one when I did. Oh, the number of negative reactions far, far outnumber the positive reactions.

ELLEN: Can you remember—recall one in particular, one that ...

DAVID COPE: Oh yeah. I was at a conference in Germany in which a colleague hit me on the nose with his finger. I'm—I'm pretty much a coward physically, you know, he was bigger than I so, it was a—it was quite a moment. But there have been many, many occasions. You know, shouting matches. If you've spent a good portion of your life being in love with, you know, these dead composers—I mean, that sounds horrible but you know what I mean—and along comes some twerp who claims to have this little piece of software which he says isn't even much at all, that can move you in the same way, suddenly you're saying to yourself "Well, what’s happened here? Certainly my—my relationship to the original pieces of music is cheapened in some way." I mean, what, is Chopin really just nothing more than a bunch of cliches strung together? I hurt with them in a way, and when they hurt I feel successful, and I also feel very bad. I mean, I'm messing with some pretty powerful relationships here, and doing so in a mechanical way. If I'd done it myself as a human being, these individuals could probably live with it because after all they could say, "Well, you know, he’s really good at this sort of thing." But somehow using HAL, you know, or some version of HAL is the ultimate insult. There is nothing intelligent about my program in the slightest, nothing intelligent about it. I could do everything it did if it gave me 10 years. I just don’t have that amount of time, I'd rather spend five minutes, thank you very much.

DAVID COPE: We did a concert here of Bach, of EMI Bach. And the middle movement is just adorable, I mean it's just lovely. And a friend of mine was sitting in the back of the hall next to an ancient lady, she must have been in her 80s, late 80s. And she couldn't read very well, so she hadn't read the program notes, so she really just was at this concert because friends told her. She didn't really know what it was all about or anything like that, but she knew all about music and she really loved Bach. And she listened to that, and she turned to my friend and said, "Oh, that was just beautiful." And my friend started to say, "But do you know that it was ..." and then he said, "Well, the hell with that." It was the reaction that I hope people will have 100 years from now if by some weird fluke this stuff hangs around long enough to still be around then, then I hope we can put aside all this machine-trapping stuff and really just deal with the music itself.

JAD: Piece was produced by Jonathan Mitchell, and recorded by our producer Ellen Horne. David Cope composes and teaches at UC-Santa Cruz in California. If yo'’d like to hear any more compositions by his computer EMI—and there are hundreds—you can visit our website, Radiolab.org. There you will find EMI Bach, EMI Chopin, EMI Scott Joplin, even EMI Navajo music. And the scary part is that much of it is quite good.

ROBERT: EMI Navajo music.

JAD: Yup. Um, well I guess we should sign off, right?

ROBERT: Yes. I'm just still thinking about EMI Navajo music.

JAD: Actually, you know what? Let's let EMI take us out.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: This is actually your favorite composer as reanimated by EMI the computer.

ROBERT: Mahler?

JAD: EMI Mahler.

ROBERT: Huh. Oh, damn. You know, this is—it's very troubling. This is very troubling.

JAD: [laughs]

[ARCHIVE CLIP, EMI Malher, Voice Singing: My father worth has occurred when he married my mother.]

JAD: And for more information on anything you heard this hour check our website radiolab.org and while you’re there communicate with us. Radiolab.org is the address. This is Radiolab. I’m Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I are signing off.

[DIANA DEUTSCH: Okay, here we go. Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad and Ellen Horne, with help from Sarah Pellegrini, Sally Herships, Melissa Kegel, David Margin, Michael Shelley, Amber Seely, Laura Bitharley, and special thanks to Eileen Delahunty, John Elliott and the LaGuardia High School Chorus, which includes Anna Carey, Melanie Charles, Jack Fuller, Lucas Isodoro, Horace Michael, Jonathan Roberts, Jessica Rosario and Pierre Trafskana. Special thanks to cellist Rubin Kodheli, and also special thanks to me, Diana Deutsch. Program management by Dean Capello and Michael Alsesso. Radiolab is produced by New York Public Radio and distributed by NPR. How was that? Okay, bye.]

 

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