WTF!: World’s Most Advanced Music AI Runs On Ancient Power Mac 7500

Music Professor David Cope with Emily Howell, a music AI that runs on a Power Mac 7500. Photo courtesy of Catherine Karnow.

The world’s most advanced music AI runs on a rickety old Power Mac 7500.

Called Emily Howell by its creator, music professor David Cope, the program just released “her” first album, From Darkness, Light, in January.

Some say Cope's Emily Howell program passes the Turing test: its compositions are indistinguishable from human music. Photo courtesy of Catherine Karnow.

Some say Emily Howell passes a version of the Turing Test: listeners cannot tell the music was composed by software. In a fantastic report on Cope and his work, writer Ryan Blitstein says:

At one Santa Cruz concert, the program notes neglected to mention that Emily Howell wasn’t a human being, and a chemistry professor and music aficionado in the audience described the performance of a Howell composition as one of the most moving experiences of his musical life. Six months later, when the same professor attended a lecture of Cope’s on Emily Howell and heard the same concert played from a recording, Cope remembers him saying, “You know, that’s pretty music, but I could tell absolutely, immediately that it was computer-composed. There’s no heart or soul or depth to the piece.”

Asked whether the software runs on a Power MAc 7500 (a machine that dates from the Gil Amelio era. It was discontinued April 1, 1996), Cope says:

“Yep. I tend to stay with what works rather than spend my time constantly upgrading.”

Cope, an emeritus professor at University of California at Santa Cruz, has faced fierce criticism that his program destroys notions of human creativity, to which he has a great response:

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“I can understand why it’s an issue if you’ve got an extremely romanticized view of what art is,” he says. “But Bach peed, and he shat, and he had a lot of kids. We’re all just people.”

Listen for yourself:

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