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From: colonel@gloria.UUCP (Col. G. L. Sicherman)
Newsgroups: net.books,net.ai
Subject: Re: Hofstadter on computer music
Message-ID: <711@gloria.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 6-May-85 11:16:32 EDT
Article-I.D.: gloria.711
Posted: Mon May  6 11:16:32 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 9-May-85 02:18:19 EDT
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[Do not remove this tag under penalty of law]

> "To think -- and I have heard this suggested -- that we might soon be
> able to command a preprogrammed mass-produced mail-order twenty-dollar
> desk-model "music box" to bring forth from its sterile circuitry pieces
> which Chopin or Bach might have written had they lived longer is a
> grotesque and shameful misestimation of the depth of the human spirit.
> A ``program'' which could produce music as they did would have to wander
> around the world on its own, fighting its way through the maze of life
> and feeling every moment of it.  It would have to understand the joy and
> loneliness of a chilly night wind, the longing for a cherished hand, the
&c. &c. &c.

Hofstadter is merely taking a stand. "Sterile circuitry," "depth of the
human spirit," and so on, are empty rhetoric.  Dr. Geoffrey Jefferson
wrote something similar in 1949:

	"Not until a machine can write a sonnet or compose a
	concerto because of thoughts and emotions felt, and not
	by the chance fall of symbols, could we agree that
	machine equals brain ... " [_British Med. J.,_ 25 June 1949;
					quoted with disapproval in
					Turing's "Computing Machinery
					and Intelligence."]

While Jefferson's article suffers from a few misconceptions about
computers, it is philosophically superior to Turing's.  Unfortunately,
philosophers who write about computer-generated music seldom under-
stand the nature of music.
-- 
Col. G. L. Sicherman
...{rocksvax|decvax}!sunybcs!colonel