Simulating Musical Skills by Digital Computer

Abstract

It was perhaps inevitable that the digital computer, an insrument of such enormous potential and accomplishment in the study of both natural and social sciences and humanities, should have been applied to the investigation of problems in the fine arts as well. Among the latter, music was predictably the art form most directly accessible to computational study. Painting and the plastic arts do not readily lend themselves to direct computer applications; their analysis and elucidation with the aid of computers will necessarily await the development of highly sophisticated optical scanning devices at the very least. Music, on the other hand, is normally set down and transmitted graphically in the form of a notated score that can be almost completely represented in a code consisting of discrete symbols. It must be said at once, however, that the notated musical score, even of the simplest traditional western art music, is incomplete: The musical work, as conceived by the composer and as produced by the sensitive musical performer, deviates from the precision of the printed or written score in countless subtle ways — most obviously with respect to temporal organization, but also, even, with respect to pitch and timbre.1Thus the score is at best an approximation to what can properly be designated as “the” composition. To appreciate fully what this means, it is instructive to imagine, or actually to experience, if possible, a literal realization by synthesizer of, say, a Bach sonata for unaccompanied violin (to choose a particularly extreme example). The hearer of such a realization finds it almost impossible to “follow” the music, to “make sense” of it; and this has far less to do with the timbral inadequacies of the synthesizer's violin tone than with missing temporal and dynamic nuances. (The same music speaks eloquently on ancient phonorecords, despite their obvious timbral deficiencies.) But the printed score and its representation in an appropriate linear code, incompleteness notwithstanding, present a sufficiently detailed picture of the music's structure to render it accessible to analytical probing in a depth not approachable in many other art-forms.