When most of us think about a machine composing musical pieces, we think of primitive songs coming out of a HAL 9000 that could be suitable for a child's toy, but nothing that music lovers would actually enjoy. That's because most of us haven't heard of Emily Howell. No, that's not a person—it's the name of a computer program written by University of California, Santa Cruz professor David Cope that, after nearly three decades of work, is about to release, uh, "her" first CD through Centaur Records.

Cope is Dickerson Emeriti Professor at UCSC—he attempted to retire years ago because he didn't want to go to meetings anymore—teaching graduate courses in music composition and computer-assisted composition. Cope is also an Honorary Professor of Computer Science at Xiamen University in China and is often ascribed as a computer scientist, though he insists that he is a music professor first, not a CS professor. However, given the work he has done on Emily Howell and "her" predecessor, EMI, it's clear that he has managed to mesh the two in ways that go far beyond a musical computer program.

How it all got started

You name the composer and EMI could analyze his works to spit out a new piece that sounded just like that composer had written it himself. Except he hadn't; a computer had.

Emily wasn't just born out of Cope's mind as a genius application that could compose pieces that compete with the likes of modern-day composers. Cope, a composer himself, said his work actually started around 1980 when someone commissioned him for an opera and he found himself facing mean case of composer's block. A friend who worked in artificial intelligence lightheartedly suggested he write a program to help him complete the opera. He had done some programming before—"I had to work on those large IBM mainframes with the paper cards that went in; there was no visual complement at all"—so he gave it a go.

"We assumed the program would create terrible music from the start. We assumed that, when I heard it, I would say 'I wouldn't do that, I would do this.' Sure enough, that's exactly what happened," Cope told Ars. The music was bad, and creating it was a pain; the team had to use numbers spit out by the computer and transcribe them onto a staff, then sing it or play it on a piano. So, the program got scrapped in favor of developing a new system that was "more my style." The problem was that this new program didn't quite understand Cope's style too well—"As time progressed and I got this idea of data-driven programming," Cope recalled. "Instead of me writing all the rules for the program, I would create a database of music and have the computer analyze that data to attempt to produce something like it."

Experiments in Musical Intelligence

Cope finally managed to complete his opera seven years late, but more importantly, he had developed a project that he called Experiments in Musical Intelligence, or EMI (pronounced "Emmy") for short. EMI was originally developed to analyze his own musical style by feeding it past compositions in hopes of finding patterns—little musical signatures that only he does—and replicating them in new ways. However, he found that the program wasn't just good for him—the analytical engine worked for nearly every composer in history. Bach, Beethoven, Mahler—you name the composer and EMI could analyze his works to spit out a new piece that sounded just like that composer had written it himself. Except he hadn't; a computer had.

Needless to say, once the rest of the world began to get wind of this, things got pretty interesting. On one side, academia embraced Cope's work. "Extremely positive feedback came from the science community," Cope said. "They really seemed to feel that my work has had great potential in many areas other than just music."

The music side was a different story. "Most musicians, academic or composers, have always held this idea that the creation of music is innately human, and somehow this computer program was a threat in some way to that unique human aspect of creation," Cope said. "I have always refuted that by saying a human built the machine, listens to the output, and chooses what's the best. What's less human about that than if I had taken years and years to just compose the whole thing myself?"

A lot, apparently. Because EMI is just a computer program, Cope needed musicians to play the pieces that EMI had created. A number of big-name classical performers expressed interest, but their agents wouldn't let them touch it with a ten-foot pole, citing industry controversy over Cope's work. "They thought it would blemish the name of the performer," Cope said. Apparently, the number of negative reactions "far outweighed" the number of positive ones.

(You can listen to a number of MP3s generated by EMI online.)

The "birth" of Emily Howell

Cope isn't exactly the type of guy who lets detractors get to him. "I initially get five minutes of anger, and then I'm immediately back to work again saying 'I'll show those SOBs.'" But instead of improving upon EMI to create something that would please even the most vocal critics, Cope decided to scrap the entire project for something that he thinks is far more controversial.

Around the start of 2003, Cope decided to take his decades'-worth of musical databases to the virtual dump. He kept the fruits of EMI's labor, but not the data that generated those pieces—"I essentially stopped doing historical replications. That aspect of my work was finished," he said. From there, he created what he describes as the succession of EMI: Emily Howell.

Instead of feeding Emily a database of works that already exist, he gave her a collection of works that EMI had produced to get it going and, from there, she began working on her own musical style. Cope described Emily's style to be similar to modern composers, a "sort of an amalgam of all styles" and very contemporary. But what makes Emily interesting isn't just that; it's the fact that she can take audible feedback—musically or verbally—from an audience in order to modify her compositions. "The program produces something and I say yes or no, and it puts weights on various aspects in order to create that particular version," said Cope. "I've taught the program what my musical tastes are, but it's not music in the style of any of the styles—it's Emily's own style."

(This is, of course, an extremely simplified explanation of how Emily Howell works. One of Cope's many books, Computer Models of Musical Creativity, goes into excruciating detail about how Emily operates if you're interested in learning more.)

It's for this reason that Cope believes Emily might—or at least should—be regarded as more controversial than EMI. "Most living composers feel exempt from the controversy with EMI because their music hasn't been affected by the fact that any music that sounds like Mozart is good or bad," Cope explained. "Now those same composers are looking at a competitor—a virtual composer competing in the same arena with 'her' own style and music that is really excellent. It seems to me that these composers should feel a little less smug and more defensive about their position."

Whether Emily Howell will generate the same level of attention as EMI remains to be seen, though. Because "she" basically represents a new composer, much of the world might actually brush it off as just another AI experiment whereas EMI was akin to bringing old composers back from the dead. Cope doesn't care though—it's all about furthering his research and learning how to challenge common beliefs in new ways. In fact, he's already working on his next project. "I'm currently writing a book that is attempting to claim that music is a science through mathematics. It involves game theory to create music, trying to prove that there are aspects of music aside from acoustics and sound itself—that composition is not just inspiration," he said. "To me they are as related as anyone can imagine; when I'm composing all day, I'm programming. When I'm programming, I'm composing."