According to this article:
“We have taught a computer to write musical scores,” says Gustavo Diaz-Jerez, software consultant and pianist.
“Now we can produce modern classical music at the touch of a button.”
Awesome! Let’s hear some examples!
Oh.
I’ll keep working on my own attempt for now. I want my Mozart Symphony Generator.
In the meantime, here’s Emily Howell creator David Cope performing some John Cage:
The annoying thing about creativity is that it changes its obsessions abruptly and uncontrollably. I’ve got only two scenes left to write for the novel I’ve been working on for a year and a half, and what does my mind want to do now? It wants to study Mozart’s work and write music. (At least it’s cultured, I guess.) So I spent the last few days working on this little “mini-concerto” for piano and orchestra, Piano Concerto No 0, Opus 67:
I number it ‘0’ because it is meant as more of an exercise than a “real” effort. As you might guess, it was written while studying Mozart’s harmony. In fact, the harmony and voice leading of the first section was almost completely blatantly plagiarized from one of Mozart’s piano concertos. (Figure out which one, if you dare.) But the point of the exercise wasn’t so much to be harmonically original as it was to try playing around with these classical sorts of cadences, inversions, secondary dominants, secondary leading-tone chords, and circle-of-fifth sequences. Most of my music is harmonically super simple, just root-position chords progressing through diatonic triads, such as I-iii-IV-V or I-vi-IV-V (my favorites). I hardly ever use sevenths or inversions or the ugly vii°. I’m not necessarily trying to change my “style”, but I would certainly like to expand it. Who wouldn’t? Plus, I love Mozart, so I’d like to try to understand how he and other master composers keep their chromaticism so beautifully tonic.
Structurally, the above piece is rather lazy. It begins in sonata form, then half-way through the development it section, it repeats and ends. I guess the repeat can count as recapitulation? No? Oh well. I was ready to move on. I’ve never been a sonata-form fan.
While I was working on this piece, I also got some ideas on how to expand my melody generator into a full-blown symphony generator. So I’ve got some programming experiments to try, but they will take a lot of work. So… the Mozart Symphony Generator, coming soon… (we can dream at least)
While trying to work on my novel, my mind sometimes turns to mush and I can’t think creatively, at least not in the way that novel-writing calls for. So I began a journal with which to chronicle my thoughts and explorations as I search for Strong AI. I would love to live to see Strong AI achieved; who wouldn’t?
My short term goal, however, is to create a computer program that can teach itself to play chess (or any rule-based game) in such a way that we can observe the rules that it learns. As far as I know, no one has achieved this. Chess engines focus on number-crunching algorithms, using the computer’s ability to calculate quickly to its advantage rather than trying to simulate how a human would learn things. But if we can figure out how a human learns the game, I think the algorithms involved would be far more useful to advancing human knowledge than number-crunching algorithms created specifically for the game. I want an algorithm that creates algorithms.
Anyway, I have written up my explorations so far in my new little journal. You can download a PDF of the journal here. It’s a bit too long and clunky to post as a blog entry. I hope that as I continue to explore the subject, I will write and upload more journal entries.
Not sure anybody else out there is interested in the subject, but I’ll put it out there in case anyone is curious. Join me, and together we will rule the world.
I have a tough time understanding what this speaker’s main point is; he seems to vaguely dance around some issue, but doesn’t say what exactly it is. From what I can tell, it has something to do with him wanting boys to have more fictional female role models, because this will somehow be vaguely good.
He mentions the Bechdel test. According to Wikipedia, the Bechdel test is used to [vaguely] measure gender bias in stories by evaluating how female characters are represented. But the Bechdel test is, in and of itself, stupid. This is because characters are not meant to represent the class of beings to which they belong (whether it be females, aliens, priests, etc.); characters are meant to represent sides of the story’s goal (how they either help or hinder the main character) and/or sides of the story’s theme (how they encourage or discourage it).
This doesn’t mean criticisms of class representations in stories or films are invalid, but these criticisms assume that a story-creator was biased in his story-creating decisions, and that this bias is bad. (All story-creators are biased, culturally and naturally; the criticism must include why the bias is bad for it to be a criticism and not just a recognition of a trope.) The Bechdel test seems to assume that all females are represented by female characters, and if there aren’t enough female characters not talking about male characters, this is a bad misrepresentation of females. But female characters are meant to serve a story purpose, not a cultural representation purpose. (The same goes for male characters in female-oriented romantic comedies.) So the test is invalid, at least when applied to stories in general.
(A criticism would be: “Hey, all the females in this guy’s films are evil and manipulative. Why?” Or: “Hey, all the father figures in these American sitcoms are dimwits. Why?”)
So to say, as he does, “I think our job in the Netflix queue is to look out for those movies that pass the Bechdel test” seems rather naive. That is, whether or not a movie passes the test implies nothing about what gender views or values they will encourage. Nor does it make any sense to “nudge our sons to identify with those heroines” rather than heroes as if that will somehow naturally promote something vaguely good.
Not that you’d want to nudge them away either.
My point is simply that girls and boys being biased toward role models of their own sex (and the social roles that go along with it) is not, in and of itself, unhealthy. It seems rather obviously natural to me. So you don’t have to do anything about it. (Abusing women is not a characteristic of recognizing differentiated gender roles; it is a characteristic of depraved morals in general. One does not imply the other.)
If you have something specific to criticize about gender representations in fiction (besides story-purpose roles, such as the “damsel in distress” trope), go for it, and prepare to argue it. But this talk is too vague.
I recently saw that someone on YouTube by the username of Remkus uploaded this beautiful rendition of my “Lullaby for the Lost” with cello and whistle. Awesome!
Movies have become rather expensive these days, no? Why spend $10 or more when I can wait a year and spend $1 renting a disc? It better be a movie I really want to see.
I have argued before that a subscription service would be nice. A monthly fee for unlimited trips to the theater.
And that’s what it looks like the new MoviePass service will provide. According to this article: “MoviePass provides film enthusiasts the ability to attend unlimited [regular 2D] movies for a monthly fee.”
Oh boy!
But elsewhere they say, “MoviePass members are able to see up to one 2D movie per day.” And you can only see a film once. I think these are… gee, what are they called… limits. I would run out of movies every month.
I’d prefer it if the movie theater companies themselves offered such services. This seems a bit clunky:
Right now, the only plan they seem to have is $35 a month for an annual plan. That’s $420 a year. I’d have to see quite a few movies in theaters for that to compete with rentals from Netflix. Doesn’t really seem like that great of a deal. But currently the service is only in a “limited private beta” so perhaps their offerings will improve later on down the road.
I guess we’ll see where it goes… with their current offerings, I think I’ll pass.
It annoys me when characters on TV shows, especially sci-fi shows, are portrayed as being super-intelligent by being able to ramble off precise probabilities, as if probabilities of natural occurrences are some precise science. “The chances of succeeding are only 34.56 percent!” No, they are either 0 percent or 100 percent. The mathematics of probabilities are a compromise; probabilities provide a way for us to make decisions based on insufficient knowledge. They are not real-world measurements just because we use the word “percent” when talking about them.
“I am 53.45 percent done reading this book.” That’s a real-world measurement.
“There is one bullet left in this gun, so the chance of me shooting you is 16.6… percent.” That’s a measurement of imagined futures based on not knowing which chamber a bullet is in. The bullet is only in one chamber. There is only one possible future.
Truly intelligent characters do not compute precise probabilities in their heads. It is a completely impractical way to go about thinking or making decisions.
This annoys me as much as the idea that emotions and intelligence are somehow naturally at odds, and the price for higher intelligence is the ability to feel emotions.
Here’s a half-hour excerpt of a radio show (audio tape) I recorded in 1992 when I was six years old:
I never made it in the radio business.
A tragically short glimpse at Pixar’s next short, to precede Monsters University. It’s awesome how much expression they can get with just eyes, eyebrows, mouths, and head movement. Something to study.
Since I talk about the ending of the film here, this post contains SPOILERS. It probably won’t make any sense to someone who hasn’t seen the movie anyway.
The Cabin in the Woods was funny, clever, and quite innovative. But, overall, it did not hold up for me because I didn’t understand the ending. As the end approached, it seemed as if the main characters were getting deeper into the heart of horror stories, even if metaphorically. They were discovering why horror stories were told, why the tropes were upheld. I thought the film was going to give us some sort of interesting insight. But I think the writers got it wrong. They either ignore the themes of horror stories, or simply refuse to accept them.
“They didn’t just want us to die,” a character says near the film’s end, as they discover their horror story experience was all part of some elaborate scheme much bigger and more important than themselves. “They wanted us to be punished.”
“Punish us for what?”
“For being young,” another character says.
So, we want young people to be punished in horror stories because of their youth?
Not in the real world. Youth has nothing to do with it; horror stories work with characters of any age. Youth just makes it easier for a character to be believably immature.
The horrible punishments horror story victims receive is actually for being hedonists. For being somehow morally flawed. Just like the Willy Wonka victims. It’s for believing in and pursuing empty pleasures. Horror story monsters are the embodiment of the spiritual emptiness of the characters’ pursuits or world views, whether it be lust, anger, pride, etc., or something more subtle.
In the film, these youthful deaths are rituals made to placate mysterious ancient gods in the underworld.
In reality, the rituals (in other words: horror stories) are for us humans, to serve to remind us of these lessons, of what is morally right and wrong. Casting our consciences into a pit of giant ancient evil gods makes very little sense. (Unless you are a moral relativist, I guess?)
The tropes of horror films become “tropes” not because they are actually devoid of merit or spiritual meaning, but because they become so recognizable and guessable that, together, they lose their ability to remind us of their meaning. This doesn’t mean the tropes were always actually empty silly nonsense, or that we should discard them.