David Cope, Godfather of A.I. Music, Is Dead at 83
David Cope, a composer and pioneer in the field of algorithmic composition, who in the 1980s developed a computer program for writing music in the style of Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and other Classical masters, died on May 4 at his home in Santa Cruz, Calif. He was 83.
The cause was congestive heart failure, his son Stephen Cope said.
Before the proliferation of A.I. music generators, before the emergence of Spotify and the advent of the iPod, before Brian Eno had even coined the term 'generative music,' Mr. Cope had already figured out how to program a computer to write classical music.
It was 1981 and, struggling with writer's block after being commissioned to compose an opera, he was desperate for a compositional partner. He found one in a floppy disk.
The process was straightforward but tedious. Mr. Cope started by quantifying musical passages from his own work, rendering them as numbers in a database that could be analyzed by a pattern-identifying algorithm he created. The algorithm would then reassemble the 'signatures' — Mr. Cope's name for the patterns it found — into new combinations, and he would convert those combinations into a score.
It wasn't the first time someone had used a computer to create music. In 1957, Lejaren Hiller and Leonard Isaacson had employed a five-ton supercomputer at the University of Illinois to compose 'Illiac Suite,' widely considered to be the first computer-generated score. But Mr. Cope's program took things a step further: By scanning and reproducing unique signatures, his algorithm could essentially replicate style.
After years of troubleshooting and fine-tuning, the program, known as Experiments in Musical Intelligence, was able to produce a full opera in a matter of hours. EMI, or Emmy, as Mr. Cope affectionately called it, was officially born. It was one of the earliest computer algorithms used to generate classical music.
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