The narratives that music lovers will never warm to music composed by computers and that music is a zero-sum game pitting humans against machines are a threat to innovation. Those in the music tech industry should acknowledge that we may be internalizing this made-up battle and holding ourselves back.

I’m more apt to believe another musical luminary, Duke Ellington, who decreed, “If it sounds good, it is good.”

David Cope is the godfather of computer composition. He told NPR as late as last May that listeners “don’t want to see” software in the credits of their music. (Full disclosure: I got my bachelor’s degree from UC Santa Cruz where Cope is on faculty.)

Cope has great mind and is a fine artist. He is also the reason I don’t think people have a problem with AI-composed music.

When you start out as I did, a 17-year-old habituated to hearing talented musicians performing music composed by an algorithm, there is no outrage; it’s just music. My colleagues performed Cope’s music and created their own composition algorithms. The music was either good or not.

In fact, I’ve yet to hear machine learning create better music than even his decades-old algorithms — but that’s another post altogether.