A few thoughts inspired by an interview with David Cope

http://www.psmag.com/culture/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9puyNuMXkEw


The beauty of a diamond does not depend on whether it was reached by a human
with a shovel, or by a drilling machine.
Similarly, the beauty of a musical piece should not depend on whether it was `mined'
by a human or computer.
Here the mining is done in the space of all possible combinations of notes in space and time.

You would not compare a cellist and pianist and say `Oh the cellist is not as good because he could not play fast sequences of 4 chord notes' or `The pianist is not as good because he cannot control the nuances of  the volume and color of a single note'.

A piano is a tool created with technology: You have a machine that plays the actual strings for you. You lose some control over the details, and gain the ability to play more complicated combinations of notes.

Similarly, music mining technologies will be a tool with it's own disadvantages and advantages.
They will not eliminate the need for creativity and talent of the user. As pianists are compared to each other,
users of these new tools will be compared to each other on how well they use them.

A bit of topic, now that much of the world is secular, people are looking for things to deem sacred.
One such thing is human creativity.
And there is always the question: Was this musical idea\physics law\technology` invented\created' or `discovered'?
I tend to view things more on the discovery side..like exploring a new land,
we are exploring the lands of sound combinations\mathematical notions\ect..
which at a more general level are explorations of all possible manifestations of mind and matter.