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From: minsky@ml.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Re: SYMPOSIUM: Can Computers Compose Creatively?
Message-ID: <1996May26.171852.10122@media.mit.edu>
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Organization: MIT Media Lab
References: <18965@832742984> <4nv4h5$9eq@news.eecs.umich.edu> <4o9lq6$6gh@news.NetVision.net.il>
Date: Sun, 26 May 1996 17:18:52 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:39044 comp.ai.philosophy:41940 sci.cognitive:12675 comp.music.misc:1730

In article <4o9lq6$6gh@news.NetVision.net.il> talcohen@netvision.net.il (Tal Cohen) writes:
>In <4nv4h5$9eq@news.eecs.umich.edu>, fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu (Matthew H. Fields) writes:
>>I'm sorta saddened to see Hofstaedter still trying to talk music
>>so far beyond his ken.  He's such an excellent speaker on recursive
>>language and its consequences, I wish he'd stick to that.
>
>This could be the case, but Hofsadter works introduced me (and doubtlessly
>many others) to the wonderful worlds of classical music.
>
> - Tal Cohen (talcohen@netvision.net.il)

I don't know what this is supposed to be about, but I consider
Hofstadter to be at the top rank of theorists of "creative" thinking,
reasoning by analogy, searching for solutions to both well-defined and
ill-defined problems and so forth.  As for what in the field of music
is "beyond his ken", I wonder if fields@zip.eecs.umich.edu might
provide a short list of published papers of theories about how music
works to affect us, and how composers construct pieces that have those
effects.  Can he name two or three others who have said better things
about this than has hofstadter?

I have one paper about that sort of thing, which you can read in
ftp://ftp.ai.mit.edu/pub/minsky/MusicMindMeaning. Otto Laske and
Stephen Smoliar have written some about this (I don't have citations
handy). I can't think of many significant others. In the music
profession, there seems to me to be so little work that one could
rightly call "theory of musical psychology" that I've had to conclude
that there must be an unconscious taboo about that subject.  I do know
something about the very active field of of programs for composition
but, generally,thore researchers don't write about the psychology of
their effects.  And there are some good examples of what I'd call
"grammar-oriented" work on musical structures, e.g., by Lehrdal,
Jackendoff, and others -- but in my view these don't go far enough in
the direction of theorizing about the underlying processes involved in
composing and reacting to music.


