I agree with 99% of your post. But I think you're missing an important point from the OP. Good musicians and composers have an intuitive feel of what makes good music. In Mozart's case, he very much learned the "music rules" (for lack of a better term) that everyone was using at the time, but what was special is what he could do with it and the subtle ways he would play with structure and tonality which were not only unique, but rarely repeated since.
And actually after listening to the music produced by this computer linked in the article...eh, I'm not all that impressed. Simple, contrapuntal music, the first sample highlighted by harmonic arpeggio under a simple moving melody and the second sample hinting at a fugue...but you only heard two voices until the clip ran out. I would need to hear more to be duly impressed, but even then I probably won't care about this music.
Here's why. This guy has essentially worked on this program for thirty years, plugging in scores from other composers. He worked out the pattern recognition with various composers and told the program to do exactly that. The program is really only doing what he told it to do, which is imitate and parrot. Thing is, it might be good or it might be bad, but who determines if it's good or not? Is it Cope himself? The beauty of the great composers is that you can listen to their music and recognize it by it's voice. Mozart has a certain sound, as does Beethoven, as does Stravinsky, and the list goes on and on. Hell, if you looked at most movie scores, you can tell who wrote the orchestral parts (I find Williams and Horner pretty easy to spot--especially their early stuff). What voice does this computer bring to composing or does it do nothing but imitate?
Also, this guy seems to contradict himself. Take this bit from the article:
“We are so damned biased, even those of us who spend all our lives attempting not to be biased. Just the mere fact that when we like the taste of something, we tend to eat it more than we should. We have our physical body telling us things, and we can’t intellectually govern it the way we’d like to,” he says. In other words, humans are more robotic than machines. “The question,” Cope says, “isn’t whether computers have a soul, but whether humans have a soul.”
Against the end of the article:
As a composer, Cope laments, he remains a “frustrated loser,” confused by the fact that he burned so much time on a project that stole him away from composing. He still just wants to create that one piece that changes someone’s life — it doesn’t matter whether it’s composed by one of his programs, or in collaboration with a machine, or with pencil on a sheet of paper. “I want that little boy or girl to have access to my music so they can play it and get the same thrill I got when I was a kid,” he says. “And if that isn’t gonna happen, then I’ve completely failed.”
So on one hand, he says humans are nothing more than robots with input/output commands and the next he wants to compose something that will change their life. On the one hand, he tries feigning modesty and then the next, he claims his work will eventually change how all composing is done. Aesthetically, I prefer the old human way. Just look at today's pop music to see what happens when you apply a set formula to something that is supposed to be subjective.
The cabal exists, of that there is no doubt, certainly since the leaked emails.
Ridiculous. They had access to years of the CRU's communication and the mere shreds of emails they could come up with were bits and pieces of infighting and revealed them not as conspirators, but human beings. And what was the result of those emails passed within the CRU? Nothing, really. No FOIA request turned down (or evidence gone missing), no papers withheld from publication, no worldwide cabal. Again, I'll provide another link.
Two further points I want to make here. Among all the uproar of the CRU hack, where is the outrage that their server was compromised? Apparently thuggery is quite acceptable. Pity they couldn't find anything over a span of thirteen years that was more damning than bickering between scientists. Secondly, the timing of the emails is very curious considering the approaching summit in Copenhagen.
You said that you have dealt with scientists. That's good. It is too bad though that they aren't climate researchers as they could probably articulate climate change far better than I can.
Granted that's over 29,000 floods you'd need to recoup the eighty grand, it's a bit misleading to say it's more expensive. The other thing to look at is whether or not the eighty thousand is worth the health of your fans (you know, where you get your revenues from). I mean, fume free might not mean much to me but to the six year old kid suffering from asthma in the front row?
I did some rough "on the napkin" calculations at about how long it would take to recoup the extra cost on the electric resurfacers for a busy ice rink and I figured it would take about eight years, give or take. Figure about eleven resurfaces a day for a rink that's available 320 days a year. If that number seems high, it's really not. All the rinks I'm familiar with have ice sessions from about 6am to 11pm at night at hour and a half intervals, so it's not out of the question. The resurfacer (Zamboni is a trade name) runs after each ice session. Given those rough numbers, in about eight years it would pay for itself. It's not a bad investment..if it works.
Also, the point about the health, I recently read (I can't quite remember the source or I'd link it here) that there were concerns about the air quality in ice rinks, which really can affect kids who are practicing every day in the rink. Think about it...you have the fumes from the machines in a walled-in environment (remember the glass!) and in a cool environment which can keep the fumes lower to the ground. It can be a real problem.
Oh, and the Capitals have some of the worst hockey ice in the league. Every Caps game I've been to, I could see the wet ice from the second deck...plus, it never seemed cold enough in the arena. But I guess that's what you get for a multi-use arena where the Caps are not the primary lease partner.
Intel CPUs are not defective, they just act that way. -- Henry Spencer
