A View from the Bus: When Machines Make Music

Abstract

musical arenas, as often happens when they begin to use computers to make music, issues which they never worried about before start to crystallize into cares and concerns. What follows1 is an attempt to say something about these issues. For want of a better term I'll call these concerns the social context of machine-made music. With all the junk that occupies our workbench when we enter the digital domain-neural nets, FIR filters, quantization errors, and so on-why worry about social issues as well? I contend that the history of Western music is one which is marked by consistent, and largely unsuccessful, attempts to build music machines. But now that we have finally succeeded in this, the nature of human musical relations is consequently changing-profoundly-and it goes without saying that music will change profoundly as well. Fundamentally,