Composer David Cope has been writing software to help him compose music for 30 years, and his musically creative computer program’s latest album came out a few weeks ago:
The current version of Cope’s software is named “Emily Howell,” and it is the successor to an earlier effort he called “Emmy,” an almost-acronym for “Experiments in Musical Intelligence.” (Howell is Cope’s father’s first name and his middle name.) Ms. Howell’s ancestry dates back to 1980, when Cope — by then a successful human composer — hit a brick wall while trying to write an opera. Cope, a genuine polymath with an aptitude for computers, had been playing music his entire life and was respected among modern composers, but around his 40th birthday his ideas started to dry up. In desperation, he wrote a computer program to generate random melodies and musical ideas.
The results were predictably unlistenable. But his composer’s block persisted, so he kept working on the software. His first breakthrough came when he began to rethink how human beings compose. His software had been starting its work from scratch, but it occurred to Cope that human composers draw on a huge amount of data when they sit down to write a piece of music. “We don’t start with a blank slate,” he said. “In fact, what we do in our brains is take all the music we’ve heard in our life, segregate out what we don’t like, and try to replicate [the music we like] while making it our own.” What separates great composers from the rest of us, he says, is the ability to accurately compile that database, remember it, and manipulate it into new patterns.
Cope built a huge database of existing music, beginning with hundreds of Bach chorales that he tediously coded by hand. (Each note is given five values: pitch, duration, volume, when it appears in the piece, and which voice or instrument is making it.) The software then did essentially the same thing any complex computer model does: It scoured huge amounts of data by breaking them up into manageable chunks — in this case, short passages from the chorales — and looked for patterns. It then altered and recombined bits and pieces into new works that fit the patterns it had found. “It was an analytical problem more than a composing problem,” Cope said. Before long, the program could compose mediocre Bach-like works. It was a start.
Chorales were a natural place for a program to start because, like canons and fugues, they operate according to a set of musical rules governing harmony and structure. Unfortunately, Cope had not been commissioned to compose thousands of mediocre chorales — he had an opera to write. So next he set about analyzing more complex works that relied less on a prescribed structure. In addition to short phrases, the software now analyzed the structure of an entire piece; for instance, looking at how themes would repeat at different points. He expanded the database to include Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Barber, Copeland, and many others, including his own work.
By 1987, “Emmy” was sophisticated enough to help Cope finish his long overdue opera, “Cradle Falling.” It was a collaborative effort between Cope and his brainchild: The composer would listen to the computer’s musical ideas and incorporate the ones he liked into his piece. Working with Emmy, a project he had struggled with for seven years took only two weeks to finish. At the time, he didn’t tell anyone about the work’s genesis, and its debut in Richmond two years later garnered the best reviews of his career. The Richmond Times Dispatch described one passage as “a supreme dramatic moment, punctuated by the captivating beat of drums.”
As the program continued to improve, Cope began playing less and less of a role in the compositions Emmy was producing. Shortly after his opera debuted, he began publishing works under Emmy’s name. In 1992, she wrote 1,500 symphonies, 1,000 piano sonatas, and 1,000 string quartets, among other works, which Cope bundled under the modest title “5,000 Works.