Douglas Hofstadter wrote about the potential for computers to create music and the impact it would have:

What worries me about computer simulations is not the idea that we ourselves might be machines; I have long been convinced of the truth of that. What troubles me is the notion that things that touch me at my deepest core — pieces of music most of all, which I have always taken as direct soul-to-soul messages — might be effectively produced by mechanisms thousands if not millions of times simpler than the intricate biological machinery that gives rise to a human soul. This prospect, rendered most vivid and perhaps even near-seeming by the development of EMI, worries me enormously, and in my more gloomy moods, I have articulated three causes for pessimism:

1. Chopin (for example) is a lot shallower than I had ever thought.
2. Music is a lot shallower than I had ever thought.
3. The human soul/mind is a lot shallower than I had ever thought.

When it comes down to it, Hofstadter has an interesting point — music, fundamentally, can be created according to various formulas. Pick any genre of music, and you could write a computer program to synthesize a score of music that reflects the style of the time, just as you could teach humans to compose works in that style. He continues:

The loss described in (3), of course, would be the ultimate affront to human dignity. It would be the realization that all of the “computing power” that resides in a human brain’s 100 billion neurons and its roughly ten quadrillion synaptic connections can be bypassed with a handful of state-of-the-art chips, and that all that is needed to produce the most powerful artistic outbursts of all time (and many more of equal power, if not greater) is a nanoscopic fraction thereof — and that it can all be accomplished, thank you very much, by an entity that knows nothing of knowing, seeing, hearing, tasting, living, dying, struggling, suffering, aging, yearning, singing, dancing, fighting, kissing, hoping, fearing, winning, losing, crying, laughing, loving, longing, or caring.

Although Kala Pierson and many others may hail its coming as “truly a thing of beauty”, the day when music is finally and irrevocably reduced to syntactic pattern and pattern alone will be, to my old-fashioned way of looking at things, a very dark day indeed.

Deep thought… it’s hard to reconcile music’s inherent mathematical origin, in contrast to music’s view as human emotional expressions.

This article was discussed on Reddit, where a commenter named adrianmonk responded:

IMHO, what he leaves out is that:

• Humans had the insight to invent music in the first place.
• The fact that Chopin’s body of work can almost be reduced to a (rather large) set of parameters which can be fed into a system to produce Chopin-like works does not take away from the genius in finding those parameters. There have been many, many mediocre composers in the world; if you fed their work into this system, it would perhaps be as similar to their work as its Chopin output is similar to Chopin. But its output for these other composers would no doubt be as mediocre as their body of work. So which is more valuable, the ability to produce many works of a similar style to existing ones, or the ability to find a style that is worth producing within?

We’re not at the point where computers are cranking out new genres; composers continue to explore and innovate. So far, that’s where we retain the advantage: music constantly evolves as composers react to the entire community of musicians and composers. We operate via a feedback mechanism between audiences, composers, and musicians, which encourages the field to continue to grow and change in ways that technology can’t yet synthesize.