S. Lavrova
The problem of musical thinking and artificial intellect
The article is devoted to the issues of artificial intellect in music. Analyzing the main categories of musical thinking, the author projects them onto the area of systems that create music using the databases embedded in them. The key factors that determine the foundations of musical thinking are the elements of musical language, structures that support predictive functions in music, which determine its stable elements. The predictive function contributed to the comprehension of the material, and repeatability was one of the fundamental principles of organizing the whole and dividing it into parts. The algorithmic foundations of the new music, such as serial matrices in the music of the second avant-garde, the first attempts to create an algorithmic composition by L. Hiller and L. Isaacson, the stochastic method of J. Xenakis, K. Stockhausen’s “Theory of a Unified Time Field” are analyzed. The article examines in detail the mechanisms of operation of D. Cope EMI’s artificial intellectual system for creating music. The author identifies the factors that led to the emergence of the phenomenon of musical artificial intellect: the linguistic orientation of modern art, predictive functions, as well as a change in the role of the author, acting in the position of a designer. The “death of the author” of the postmodern era leads to another change of functions: to the recombination of already existing material. The conclusion of the study is a statement of the deliberate substitution of cultural experience, while musical thinking, its patterns and specifics, which became the starting point of this study, have nothing to do with artificial intellect and its products. Even if the algorithms embedded in one or another program imitate the laws of musical development, the machine is not capable of thinking.
Key words
musical thinking, artificial intellect in music, music and language, EMI system, D. Cope.
For citation
Lavrova S. The problem of musical thinking and artificial intellect // South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2023. No. 4. Pp. 84-95.