The Bach Impostor

I came across an article titled "People are confusing computer generated music with the works of J.S. Bach", and it talks about a computer program called "Kulitta" which is another software that has been successful in automating music composition, and when I say successful, I mean that even "music sophisticates" as the article describes them, have been fooled into thinking that they are listening to Bach, when in fact they are actually listening to the music composed by Kulitta.
Kulitta works very similar to other software that I have already discussed in one of my previous blog entries; it works that by analyzing the music fed to it and learning the style and rules of a certain genre or specific composer and then composing the music based on that learning, which I think is the basis for all programs that compose music, so Kulitta is obviously not the first to do this. What Kulitta does differently, and I do not mean to say that it is the only program to do this, but what it does differently is that it does not follow the rules of the genre or the style of the composer it is learning very strictly and it is able to "create sounds that no one' sever heard before" (1).

Here is an example of music composed by Kulitta.

Whether or not that is a piece of music that could be compared to Bach or any other famous composer is for these so-called "music sophisticates" and professionals to decide, and even though I am not a professional musician and I never really had a formal music education beyond basic music theory and music history, in my humble opinion, I do think that this sounds beautiful and it is good music, and if it is supposedly fooling some professionally trained musicians into thinking this (or other pieces composed by Kulitta) is a piece by composed by J.S. Bach himself, then it must be doing a very good job at what it is supposed to do. I had gone over programs which fooled people with their music into thinking it was music composed by a human, but Kulittta fools them into thinking it is actually music by Bach.

Kulitta's creator, Donya Quick, a professor at Yale, says Kulitta is not supposed to replace human composers, it is only meant to be used as a tool for composers to find inspiration and help them in composing their own music. For example, Kulitta can generate bits and pieces of music or whole songs in a matter of seconds, but it is up to the human to determine which are the good bits and which are not, and put it all together.

This all goes back to my first post in which I mentioned how some musicians may not like the idea of a computer program doing their job for them, and some may feel as if the people making these programs are trying to replace them, and to a certain extent I can understand where they're coming from, but we live in a very open minded society when it comes to music and just to art in general, and I do believe that these composers which are closed to the idea of a computer making music should at least give it a chance, after all, if some of them listen to a piece by Kulitta and believe it is music composed by Bach, then they cannot really deny the fact that it is good quality music.

Human composers will always be around. I do not think computers will ever be able to completely replace human composers, no matter how good these programs get at composing music. After all, human creativity is the one responsible for introducing and coming up with new styles and genres of music, and we just give computers the rules so they can then learn the genre.