Lately I’ve been reading a book called “Computer Models of Musical Creativity” by David Cope. Cope is a musician and programmer who has created software which composes classical music, usually within the style of existing historical composers. The method by which the software does this is complex – you basically have to read the book to understand it – but it does create “human sounding” music that is good, if not great.

One question I’ve had while reading the book is why Cope limits himself to (western) classical music. He explains…

Popular music, for the most part, relies on lyrics, particular timbres, performance context, and many other factors my program cannot control. The mere fact that we know most popular music by its performer, rather than its composer, should confirm the problem.

(Italics are Cope’s.)

He makes a good case, especially in regards to timbre. A song originally played on electric guitar but transferred to zither will not have the same impact. The electric guitar has a certain beefy, manly machismo that gets lost with other instruments. Cope’s point is that it’s not the notes themselves that drive, say, “Black Dog” by Zeppelin, but the notes combined with the guitar tone and various other factors and nuances of performance. On the flip side, Bach’s first invention is largely driven by the notes on the page (combined, one hopes, with a good performance.)

Nonetheless, I don’t see why Cope or some other programmer couldn’t create music that takes timbre into account. I could envision a music creation program that tracks trends in instrument timber and then predicts what will be next and generates some very hip music!

Here’s an example of some of Cope’s music. It’s a bit stiff as it is being rendered by a computer (as opposed to being played by a human (which it could be)), but gives you the picture.

A while back I stumbled across an interesting and much discussed speech that one of the White House Economic Advisors gave at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Here’s a link to an NPR piece which discusses it and also links to the text of the speech. I think the speech offers a good analysis of the music business and can also be applied to many other industries. I think it also points to a grim, probably unavoidable future for mankind.

The crux of the speech is this. If you were a singer in 1860, you had a limited audience you could service. If you lived in St. Louis, you were limited to people in St. Louis (unless you traveled to New York at which point you could not longer play for people in St. Louis.) Distance basically limited how big you could get; you had to actually be in front of people to sell your product – your voice.

The result was that you had a lot of people in a lot of towns making a living as singers. No one one got really big but they basically got by. Imagine a pie chart representing the potential audience of the world. In 1860 that pie chart would be divied up into tens of thousands of tiny slices owned by each singer in each town etc.

Then radio came along, as did records, tapes, cds etc. Suddenly you could sell your product – your voice – without actually being in front of people. You were much less limited by distance. Certain performers (Al Jolsen, Bing Crosby etc.) grew to be considered the best and grabbed a much bigger slice of the pie. The losers crawled into an alley and died.

Now we have Beyonce and Jay-Z owning a giant chunk of the pie while unappreciated talents such as myself toil in obscurity. (My dad made an interesting point about this – Michael Jackson is still selling tons of albums and he’s dead! With recordings, even death is no barrier to doing business.)

The speech gave evidence of something I think we suspect to be true – that “the best” in the world of music may be partly just “luckier” (and better marketed, branded etc.) Once the hype machine gets going, people figure it’s easier to just buy some album that’s been given the stamp of approval by the masses than take a chance on something unknown.

As we think about it, we can see that this process applies to more than just music. Let’s say you want a cola drink in 1860. I suppose you go down to the local drug store and buy a cola drink made with syrup from a semi-local cola manufacturer. Maybe it’s “Bob’s Cola.” No one can really dominate the cola market because the barrier of distance prevents any one manufacturer from getting into every city in the U.S. But trains start to get better and distribution networks develop and suddenly Coke is king (and Pepsi not far behind.) “Bob’s Cola”, which used to have a small slice of the cola pie, is now gone.

Basically, over the course of the past 150 years we’ve had an increase in networking and distribution and that has enabled market victors to increase their share over various markets. But this is just the beginning. The world is becoming even more networked at a dizzying rate. Will the victors increase their share of the pie more and more until they own the whole thing? Are we headed towards an increase in unequal distribution of wealth? Will hordes of cannibalistic zombies rise from the earth and seek human flesh? The answer to all these questions can only be “YES!”

I’ve long loathed the pretentious writing of New Yorker music writer Sasha-Frere Jones. I’ve spent considerable hours envisioning his screaming body being dipped into a vat of boiling hot AIDS. Nonetheless, he has a pretty good recent post about the challenges for musicians in the Spotify fueled era of free music.

What about an excellent, working band like Dawn of Midi, whose new album, “Dysnomia,” received a score of 7.9 in Pitchfork this week? (I’d say 8.9 but who’s counting?) This band uses a grand piano, an upright bass, and a drum set to make their music; touring means they either play venues with grand pianos on site (relatively common) or that they rent a very big van (uncommon, if we’re talking about small bands trying to drag around a grand piano). More to the point, their music needs to be recorded in a well-equipped live studio by a skilled engineer; Garageband and other popular home-recording software programs are of no use in properly capturing a mechanically traditional band, that is, despite an advanced aesthetic vision. Some kind of business model needs to remain in place, or we won’t have albums like “Dysnomia.”

This makes a point I’ve been thought about. In this new era, where the music is essentially a giveaway (hopefully to build audiences for live shows or increase t-shirt sales), music produced electronically has a distinct advantage. If you have even a bare bones digital music recording set up (such as Garageband which is free with Macs) and some good samples, it’s not that hard to produce good sounding music. (I’ve recorded plenty and posted it here. You can argue about the quality, I suppose, but some of it has gotten on television and in short films.) All you really need to invest is time. But if you want to record live instruments (guitars, drums, tubas, voice, etc.) you need space to record them (ideally space designed for proper acoustics), expensive mics, maybe some amps, etc. The proposition gets a whole lot pricier.

Here’s a scenario that illustrates the issue. Let’s say you’re doing a film score and the director says, “I want some slow, soothing chords over this scene.” You could write out some music for four cellos, hire the players, rent a studio, mike the instruments and record them; this might take days. Or you could sit down at your MIDI keyboard, find a “soothing” patch and knock out a minute’s worth of music. This could be done before lunch.

Now I would generally agree the first option is going to sound better but’s going to cost a lot more.