Emily Howell, a classical composer, is set to debut her new album in the coming weeks. The thing is, Emily Howell is a computer program. Emily is the creation of David Cope, a composer and programer. Over the last 30 years Cope has been on the vanguard of artificial creativity. AC is a branch of the field of artificial intelligence applied to creative work. Cope isn't the first to create of art through machines. Others have created paintings, poetry, and stories. But what distinguishes Cope's work is its soulfulness.

Listen to a sample from Emily Howell.

The first few notes of Howell's recent compositions are stirring and emotive. If music is communication than Emily Howell definitely passes the Turing test. Cope's process has developed through many publications, books, compositions, and iterations on artificially created music. There's lots of material about his process, controversy, and accomplishments.

Much of the debate surrounding Cope's work circles around the esoteric notion of human creativity, the belief that creativity is an act of the soul, something a machine doesn't have, something a machine can't do. Cope doesn't really care about the notion of a soul. He just cares about beautiful music.

Cope is of the opinion that every creative act is simply the amalgamation  of the creators previous experiences reassembled in a new way. His computer programs essentially do exactly that. His first program, EMI built in the 80's, analyzed the note patterns of existing works and produce something new based on those patterns. Emily Howell takes the process to the next level. Howell actually creates new musical statements and Cope will respond "yes" or "no". Based on the response, Howell incorporates the music into the piece. This past February Howell released three original opuses with another trio in the works.

What's most interesting for us at the MDM is examining the role of technology in the creative process. I've written many times about technology as a tool for the creator. But in Cope's case technology is more than a tool, it is the creator itself. True, a human sets the parameters and tweaks the variables but the product, or more importantly the experience of the product, is created by the computer.

Let's extend this thought experiment to matters simpler than classical music. Graphic design, for example, it wont be long until there's a website where you select some variables enter some text and it spits out a logo or a game engine that uses a series of parameters to create levels and puzzles and mechanics. Is this march toward simpler production a step forward or a step back? Are these just new tools in the toolkit of the creator or are they fundamentally changing the creative process and our experience of the material?

Workers will constantly have the benefit of new technological tools. Tools to automate the mundane, tools to speed up the process, but Emily Howell and other technologies of creation, where the human simply  becomes the feedback mechanism for the machine changes the equation. This is an unstoppable progression.

This blog post was written by Martin Balfour, a computer program, and edited by Ryan Nadel.

Read more about Emily Howell and David Cope here.